College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Iowa State University

Same story, different plant

First it was corn. Now Alan Myers and Martha James are looking at starch in Arabidopsis
A team of Iowa State scientists has been active over a number of years in plant metabolism research, including significant success in obtaining grants from the National Science Foundation.

Those grants pale in comparison however to the most recent grant Alan Myers, professor and chair of the Department of Biochemistry, Biophysics and Molecular Biology; Martha James, adjunct associate professor, and Eve Wurtele, professor of botany, have received.

The trio has been awarded a four-year $2,048,943 NSF grant on the "Functional Genomics of Arabidopsis Starch Metabolism."

"The scale of this grant is significantly bigger than what we have been awarded in the past," Myers said.

Earlier this year, the NSF provided Myers and James with a $330,000 grant to continue their research on cornstarch. The duo is attempting to boost the value of corn by increasing the level of starch in the plant or changing the qualities of the starch.

Their most recent grant from NSF comes from the Arabidopsis 2010 Research Grant., a program intended to discover the function of every gene in the model plant system Arabidopsis thaliana (mustard plant) by the end of the decade.

Arabidopsis is the first plant to have its complete genome sequence determined. Myers says with that information, all of the 25,000 genes present can be identified.

"There is an international effort to identify every single gene and figure out the function of those same genes in this plant," Myers said. "The next step towards a comprehensive understanding of the organism is to learn the function of each one of the genes.

"Plants are so complex that it takes this worldwide effort to understood how Arabidopsis works."

Along those lines, Myers, James and Wurtele looked at every gene in the Arabidopsis plant that may have something to do with starch. Their particular 2010 Program project targets a subset of 30 genes that can be predicted to be involved in the assembly or disassembly of starch.

"This process is fundamental to plant life because it allows energy in sunlight to be stored, through photosynthesis, in the form of carbohydrates, and then to be utilized later when energy supplies are required including during the night or when the seed germinates underground," Myers said. "Starch metabolism is a determining characteristic of plants as a biological system. It's central to the way it works."

The research team's goal is to determine the specific molecular mechanism by which each of the 30 gene products in the study set functions in starch metabolism. Myers says they also hope to discover other genes from among the 25,000 that have been identified in the Arabidopsis genome that function in the same process.

Not only is the scale of the NSF grant bigger than Myers is used to working with, but so is the number of genes the research team will focus on.
"We're used to be working on just one or two genes at a time. Now all of a sudden we're working on 30," he said. "It's a much different approach for us."

Additional research groups in Great Britain and France are working on similar projects. Myers hopes to unite his group with the international activities to form a consortium working on the project.

"We share the same objectives so we should be able to divide up the work much more efficiently now because of the Internet," he said. "This is a new paradigm. It moves us beyond the individual focus into more consortium type of science."