Bread wheat rising?
Scientists hope to bring organic hard wheat--and the mills, bakeries, jobs, and income that would spring up around it--to Ohio
Deb Stinner sees bread wheat growing where it hasn't been: in Ohio.
Her work could boost income for the state's organic farmers, create new jobs at new mills and new bakeries, and give people more good, fresh, local bread.
Stinner and her colleagues--Mary Guttieri and Clay Sneller of Ohio State and Ed Souza of the U.S. Department of Agriculture--are evaluating hard winter wheat in Ohio. They're looking for varieties that are genetically suited to growing here--specifically, under organic production.
If they find them--they think they will--they'll determine the best ways to grow them organically. Soil fertility and amendments, disease control and resistance, baking quality, and more, plus how they all interconnect, will be studied.
A new organic grain mill in Henry County (wanting more local grain), at least two Ohio-based bakeries (ditto), and a number of organic farmers are actively interested.
"It's important to keep a small grain (such as wheat) in an organic rotation," said Stinner, administrative coordinator of Ohio State's Organic Food and Farming Education and Research (OFFER) Program. "But it's also the part that gets the least economic return." A typical four-year organic rotation has corn, soybeans, wheat, and red clover in it.
"I was looking for something that could increase the value of (the small-grain) part of a good solid organic rotation," she explained. "I got interested in hard wheat because I knew it was valuable, and also because I like good bread."
While Ohio farmers already grow wheat--some 1 million acres' worth just this year--most of it's soft winter wheat, good for cakes and cookies. It earns around $4 a bushel if conventionally grown and about double that if organic. Hard wheat--high in protein, needed for quality bread, and mostly shipped in from elsewhere--earns about $5 a bushel conventional and up to $20 a bushel organic.
--By Kurt Knebusch
Green genes? Roll the video
John Finer's animations show plant tissues growing, genes expressing, 'things I've never seen before'
A scientist at The Ohio State University has developed a way to see weeks' worth of plant genes at work in just seconds.
The system--through striking time-lapse animations of plant tissues growing--shows when genes turn on, turn off, or do neither.
With it researchers can watch the process unfold, can spot changes the moment they happen, and can quantify what goes on.
John Finer, a biotechnologist with the Ohio Agricultural Research and Development Center and the system's inventor, said it will shed new light on how gene promoters function and will lead to a "toolbox" of proven promoters for use in genetic engineering--in this case, of soybeans. The promoter part of a gene dictates when and where the gene turns on.
A promoter shown to work well in root tissue, for example, could be included in a soybean line to activate genes for resistance to the root-feeding soybean cyst nematode.
"I've been studying some of these processes over the past 20 years of my career," Finer said, "and I can see things now that I've never seen before."
Until now, studying gene expression in plant tissue took weeks and often subtle changes were completely missed.
The new system, Finer said, "takes long-term experiments and condenses them into a presentable form."
It uses a digital camera; custom robotics platform; special Petri dishes that don't fog up--another Finer invention; and, in the tissue samples, a marker gene called green fluorescent protein that glows when active--if the promoter being tested has turned it on.
The camera captures images over days or weeks. Finer and colleagues collect them, create animations, and analyze the results: Which promoters turned genes on? Where? How long? How strong?
"It opens your eyes," Finer said, "to little things."
See samples of Finer's animations at http://www.oardc.ohio-state.edu/PlantranSlab/Robotics.htm (click on "digital time-lapse animations").
This invention and others earned Finer OARDC's 2009 Director's Innovator of the Year Award. He "moves discoveries closer to the marketplace," OARDC Director Steve Slack said in announcing the award at OARDC's Annual Research Conference in April.
--By Kurt Knebusch
Research helps boost beef cattle reproduction efficiency
Animal scientists with the Ohio Agricultural Research and Development Center have pioneered a new protocol for increasing pregnancy rates in beef cattle, which is expected to lead to higher production efficiency and cost and time savings for farmers in Ohio and throughout the nation.
The new fixed-time artificial insemination (AI) protocol--known as "5-day CO-Synch + CIDR"--represents an important advancement in efforts to better synchronize a beef cow's estrus (heat) cycle so that AI can be administered to the largest number of cattle possible at the same time.
"We have been working on this protocol during the past five years, modifying what has been done in the field in the past," said Mike Day, an animal sciences professor responsible for the breakthrough. "We managed to shorten the duration of standard estrus synchronization programs to increase the opportunity for cows to be at optimum fertility when AI is done."
The protocol, which has now become a recommended practice within the beef cattle industry, increases pregnancy rates of cows by 11 percent. It has been tested on more than 1,200 cows in Virginia and Ohio (including at OARDC's Eastern and Jackson agricultural research stations and at the OSU Beef Center in Columbus), resulting in 68 percent of cows getting pregnant within one day.
More information about beef reproduction research and outreach efforts can be found at http://beef.osu.edu.
--By Mauricio Espinoza
