After a year of rising food prices and diminishing grain reserves in developed countries, Cornell geneticists may have found a way to improve the outlook for global hunger. Researchers at Cornell’s Institute for Genomic Diversity have isolated the genes that determine leaf angles of maize, and with this precise knowledge in hand, farmers could develop better schematics for densely planting crops and increasing production.
“This method will allow the intelligent design of maize around the world for high-density planting, higher yields and disease resistance,” said Ed Buckler in a Cornell University press release. Buckler is a USDA-ARS research geneticist and a Cornell adjunct associate professor of plant breeding and genetics.
Along with U.S. Department of Agriculture scientists and North Carolina State University researchers, Buckler’s team made genetic crosses in maize plants in order to study the variation between many different kinds of maize. With this set of information the scientists can now observe a corn plant’s genome and predict a trait with 80 percent accuracy. This would be analogous to predicting the height of a person by sequencing and analyzing their genes, or genotyping a seed to predict traits of the plant, Buckler said in the press release.
