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The average corn yield per acre in the United States has grown fivefold over the past century. "If you applied this same improvement to cars, then the Model-T that cost $1,000 and got 30 miles per gallon would have been replaced by a car that still costs $1,000 but gets 130 miles per gallon," says Virginia Walbot, professor of biological sciences. She is the principal investigator on a genome research project designed to keep corn yields in a continuing upward curve into the next millennium by defining and sequencing all the genes of maize. The project was awarded $12.5 million by the National Science Foundation (NSF). "To corn geneticists this is like a dream come true," Walbot says. "Five years ago we didn't think that this was even possible." The project is part of a larger five-year, $85 million Plant Genome Research Program that will "contribute to a better understanding at the genome level of the inner workings of all plants, including economically important crops like maize, soybean, tomato and cotton," according to the NSF. Not only does the new corn project hold the promise of continued increases in crop yields, but the researchers have proposed an approach that, if it proves successful, could have a significant impact on the entire field of plant genetics. Instead of first mapping the entire genome of a given species and then determining the function of individual genes, as has been done in the past, the corn geneticists have suggested a technique that will simultaneously identify genes and provide a first step in defining their function. "We can turn huge corn fields into a few plates of bacteria," Walbot says. The experimental plan consists of planting 21 plots consisting of 2,304 plants. The first prototype field goes into the ground this winter.
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