College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Iowa State University

Wrong place, right research

Nation's leading cotton research conducted in Bessey Hall, not the Deep South
Jonathan Wendel has never been in the right place for his research.

His Ph.D. research was on a wild plant (Camellia japonica) that is native to Japan but is widely grown as a landscape shrub in the warmer parts of the U.S.

When he lived in the South, he was working with corn. He moves to Iowa State University, abandons that plant and starts concentrating on cotton.

"I'm always in the wrong location. It happens all the time," said the professor of botany and chair of the executive committee for the newly forming Department of Ecology, Evolution and Organismal Biology (EEOB). "Cotton is the classic botanical mystery. I've always enjoyed studying speciation and evolution, and cotton is a fascinating model to study the evolutionary process."

Wendel actually started "playing around" with cotton while in graduate school as a side project. That "side project" is now his main research focus as he studies the gene and genome evolution in polyploids in the cotton genus.

The greenhouse atop Bessey Hall has become the home of Iowa's largest cotton crop.

Still, why Iowa?

"I do face some problems," Wendel said. "The winters are long and the space is limited, but most of my research is lab-based. There are not many places in the world that have as good a faculty in plant molecular biology and genomics as Iowa State.

"I would be hard pressed to find a better place to do this (cotton research) than here."

The National Science Foundation (NSF) apparently agrees with Wendel. The NSF recently awarded Wendel a five-year, $4.2 million grant to study the comparative evolutionary genomics of cotton. Wendel is the principal investigator on this grant and is working with two other research scientists in "cotton country" from the University of Georgia and the University of Arizona.

The grant is part of a $75.6 million NSF program that will support 23 collaborative research projects in plant genomics. This year’s competition emphasized collaborative research in functional genomics, including development of tools to facilitate gene expression studies.

Plant genomic research provides the nation with scientific understanding of the structure and function of genomes of plants that are important to agriculture, environmental management, energy and health. Besides Wendel's cotton research project (the only one awarded in cotton by the NSF in this program), researchers will concentrate on such crops as maize, potato, tomato, pine, soybean, rice and grape.
Wendel says his research holds great promise for insights into central problems in development and evolution.

"One of the more vexing challenges has been to unravel the complex relationship between morphological and developmental change and evolutionary processes at the molecular level," he says.

In Wendel's project, morphological, evolutionary and genomic approaches will be integrated in an analysis of the genetic basis of the developmental transformations that occurred during cotton fiber evolution.

"By dissecting distinct stages in the morphological series, unparalleled insight will be gained into the genes involved in evolutionary transformations of cotton fiber," Wendel said.

Cotton is unique in that four different species were independently domesticated from different wild ancestors (two each in the Old World and New Worlds). Wendel hopes to gain new insight of the evolutionary stages of cotton during the divergence among wild species; early stages of domestication; modern crop improvement; and chromosome doubling.

"No one else in the world is doing this technically challenging research with cotton," he said. "We think we can develop resources and tools that will benefit the entire cotton research and breeding communities."

In the U.S. alone, cotton is responsible for 400,000 domestic jobs worth more than $40 billion. Cotton is the leading textile fiber in the world.

"The more we understand about cotton, the greater economic spin-off there will be," Wendel said. "This project will contribute significantly to the enhancement of the world's leading textile fiber through the development of important tools and resources necessary for long-term sustainability."