U of M scientist contributes to mapping of barley genome
2012-10-18
(Press-News.org) MINNEAPOLIS / ST. PAUL (10/17/2012) —An international team of researchers, including a University of Minnesota scientist, has developed an integrated physical, genetic and functional sequence assembly of the barley genome, one of the world's most important and genetically complex cereal crops. Results are published in today's issue of Nature.
The advance will give researchers the tools to produce higher yields, improve pest and disease resistance, and enhance the nutritional value of barley.
Importantly, it also will "accelerate breeding improvements to help barley adapt to climate change," says Gary Muehlbauer, head of the Department of Plant Biology, a joint department of the university's College of Biological Sciences and the College of Food, Agricultural and Natural Resource Sciences. "That means making barley more resistant to drought and able to use water and nitrogen more efficiently."
Muehlbauer is vice chair of the International Barley Sequencing Consortium (IBSC), which carried out the sequencing. The IBSC (www.barleygenome.org) was founded in 2006 and includes scientists from Germany, Japan, Finland, Australia, the United Kingdom, the United States and China. The USDA's National Institute of Food and Agriculture and the National Science Foundation provided funding for the US part of the effort.
The Nature publication provides a detailed overview of the functional portions of the barley genome, the order and structure of most of its 32,000 genes, and a detailed analysis of where and when genes are switched on in different tissues and at different stages of development. It also describes the location of dynamic regions of the genome that carry genes conferring resistance to devastating diseases. This will greatly improve the understanding of the crop's immune system.
In the 1990s, Minnesota had a million acres of barley, but that has dwindled to about 120,000 because an epidemic of Fusarium head blight, which has decimated the crop in this state. Most barley is now grown in North Dakota, Montana and Idaho.
"This resource will help make it possible to breed barley that is resistant to various pathogens, that exhibits improved grain quality, and increased drought tolerance and nitrogen use efficiency," says Muehlbauer, who holds an endowed chair in molecular genetics applied to crop improvement in the Department of Agronomy and Plant Genetics.
Sequencing of the genome will accelerate research in barley and its close relative wheat. It will also allow breeders and scientists to effectively address the challenge of feeding the world's growing population as climate change increasingly challenges growers with extreme weather events, according to the USDA.
INFORMATION: END
ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:
2012-10-18
CHICAGO—Consumers are increasingly demanding the development of ready-to-eat gluten and lactose-free food products that meet their needs and help improve their health. A recent study in Journal of Food Science, published by the Institute of Food Technologists (IFT), shows how new white sauce formulations are being created to meet these demands.
Consumers with celiac disease often find that gluten-free products are of inferior quality compared with their traditional, non-gluten-free counterparts. Traditional white sauce is made with milk, flour or starch, oil, and salt. ...
2012-10-18
CHICAGO- With over a thousand different varieties of mangoes to choose from, selecting the right variety for mango products can be a daunting task. A new study in the Journal of Food Science, published by the Institute of Food Technologists (IFT), explores the impact that processing has on the flavor and texture of mango varieties. Findings suggest that processing plays an important role in determining the flavor and texture of the final product.
Researchers at Kansas State University studied the flavor and texture of four different mango varieties as they were processed ...
2012-10-18
Salt marshes have been disintegrating and dying over the past two decades along the U.S. Eastern Seaboard and other highly developed coastlines without anyone fully understanding why.
This week in the journal Nature, scientist Linda Deegan of the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) in Woods Hole, Mass., and colleagues report that nutrients--such as nitrogen and phosphorus from septic and sewer systems and lawn fertilizers--can cause salt marsh loss.
"Salt marshes are a critical interface between the land and sea," Deegan says. "They provide habitat for fish, birds ...
2012-10-18
New research from Mount Sinai School of Medicine sheds light on how overeating can cause a malfunction in brain insulin signaling, and lead to obesity and diabetes. Christoph Buettner, MD, PhD, Associate Professor of Medicine (Endocrinology, Diabetes and Bone Disease) and his research team found that overeating impairs the ability of brain insulin to suppress the breakdown of fat in adipose tissue.
In previous research Dr. Buettner's team established that brain insulin is what suppresses lipolysis, a process during which triglycerides in fat tissue are broken down and ...
2012-10-18
CHICAGO—According to the World Health Organization (WHO), 63 percent of the deaths that occurred in 2008 were attributed to non-communicable chronic diseases such as cardiovascular disease, certain cancers, Type 2 diabetes and obesity—for which poor diets are contributing factors. Yet people that live in societies that eat healthy, plant-based diets rarely fall victim to these ailments. Research studies have long indicated that a high consumption of plant foods is associated with lower incidents of chronic disease. In the October issue of Food Technology magazine, Senior ...
2012-10-18
Overturning decades of conventional wisdom, researchers at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have found that moderately high indoor concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2) can significantly impair people's decision-making performance. The results were unexpected and may have particular implications for schools and other spaces with high occupant density.
"In our field we have always had a dogma that CO2 itself, at the levels we find in buildings, is just not important and doesn't have any direct impacts on people," said Berkeley ...
2012-10-18
Nano-ribbons of silicon configured so the atoms resemble chicken wire could hold the key to ultrahigh density data storage and information processing systems of the future.
This was a key finding of a team of scientists led by Paul Snijders of the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The researchers used scanning tunneling microscopy and spectroscopy to validate first principle calculations – or models – that for years had predicted this outcome. The discovery, detailed in New Journal of Physics, validates this theory and could move scientists closer ...
2012-10-18
Los Angeles, CA (October 17, 2012)- When it comes to analyzing gender stereotypes in the media, studies have shown that photographs of men focus on male faces while photographs of women are more focused on women's bodies. A recent study from Psychology of Women Quarterly, a SAGE journal, finds that this type of "face-ism" is even more extreme in cultures with less educational, professional, and political gender discrimination.
"Being in a relatively egalitarian cultural context does not shield politicians from this face-ism bias; in fact, it exacerbates it," wrote study ...
2012-10-18
NEW BRUNSWICK, N.J. – A Rutgers study of recent New Jersey college and university graduates with disabilities has found that students attributed their academic success to a combination of possessing such strong personality traits as self-advocacy and perseverance, and their relationship with a faculty or staff mentor.
Accessing campus accommodations was not a major issue but learning about such help "was not always the smoothest process," they noted. The research also determined that students mainly used campus resources for assistance rather than a combination of college ...
2012-10-18
UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. -- Men and women who are expectant parents have different stress reactions to relationship conflict, according to researchers at Penn State, who studied couples expecting their first child. In addition, recovery from the initial reaction to conflict also can be different for men and women, depending on individual difficulties, such as anxiety, or relationship difficulties, such as chronic relationship conflict.
The researchers found that men's increased stress levels -- measured by the amount of the stress hormone cortisol -- during a conflict discussion ...
LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES:
[Press-News.org] U of M scientist contributes to mapping of barley genome
