March 30, 2011

US scientists to improve soy production sustainability

A multidisciplinary team in the US, representing a total of 18 institutions in the country, will create new disease management technologies with a US$9.28-million grant to improve on soy production sustainability.

The team, which includes extension specialists and economists as well as biologists, will establish relationships with soy farmers and crop production and research consultants to ensure the technologies are meeting their needs and to measure potential economic value.

Making major improvements to one of the nation's high-value food crops – from the lab, to the field, to the market – is the goal of a project awarded by the USDA's National Institute of Food and Agriculture to scientists at the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute and Virginia Tech's College of Agriculture and Life Sciences.

The research activities will focus specifically on oomycete pathogens of soy including Phytophthora sojae, a deadly, soilborne plant pathogen that causes root and stem rot in soy. Soy production in the US totals approximately 3.3 billion bushels annually, which has a value of almost US$32 billion. However, damage to soy crops caused by root and stem rot cause an estimated US$300 million in annual yield loss for US farmers.

"Soybean is a very important crop for the US," explained Virginia Bioinformatics Institute Professor Brett Tyler, who serves as the project's principal investigator. "It is used in the foods that we eat, the oil that we cook with, and in animal feed. Soybean oil is also used extensively in biodiesel production. The main goal of this project is to improve the sustainability of crop production by mitigating several major diseases. This will benefit small farmers as well as larger commercial producers, and will strengthen our nation's food security system by keeping food prices down."

Over the past 10 years, information about the biology and genomics of P. sojae and other oomycetes (fungal-like microbes) has increased dramatically, due in large part to scientific advances and discoveries made by Tyler and his collaborators. The central aim of this project is to translate these discoveries into new disease management technologies that can be easily integrated with current farming practices to improve sustainable soy production.

"This project isn't as much about new discovery as it is applying our recent discoveries from the lab to make real-world improvements," said Tyler.

The Virginia Bioinformatics Institute at Virginia Tech is a premier bioinformatics, computational biology, and systems biology research facility that uses transdisciplinary approaches to science combining information technology, biology, and medicine. These approaches are used to interpret and apply vast amounts of biological data generated from basic research to some of today's key challenges in the biomedical, environmental, and agricultural sciences.

With more than 240 highly trained multidisciplinary, international personnel, research at the institute involves collaboration in diverse disciplines such as mathematics, computer science, biology, plant pathology, biochemistry, systems biology, statistics, economics, synthetic biology, and medicine. The large amounts of data generated by this approach are analysed and interpreted to create new knowledge that is disseminated to the world's scientific, governmental, and wider communities.