Khalid Meksem, a biotechnologist with the Center for Excellence in Soybean Research, Teaching and Outreach in the College of Agricultural Sciences, has received a three-year, $500,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture's National Research Initiative to set up a center where mutant plants are bred and screened for desirable genetic changes.

Meksem and his colleagues will store both the genetic profiles and the mutant seeds for use by other scientists in the United States and abroad. The center will employ undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral students, training them in plant genomics.

A new technique called TILLING—"targeting induced local lesions in genomes"—makes the center's work possible. The lesions, created in soybean seeds by soaking them in a chemical that can rearrange the seeds' DNA, indicate that mutations have taken place.

While conventional breeders have used chemicals to create mutations for decades, they did not have today's high-powered scanning and imaging machines that can pinpoint the exact location of a particular mutation on a particular gene. The new technology also allows scientists to figure out exactly what the targeted genes do, making it much easier to help breeders select for particular traits when producing new varieties the old-fashioned way.

Over the next three years, the TILLING center will produce 6,000 mutant plants from each of two soybean cultivars: Williams82, the standard for this kind of research, and Forrest, a variety much used in the nation's southerly growing regions.

For the past three years Meksem's lab has been fine-tuning the TILLING procedure to make it much more efficient and reliable in producing enough mutants to work with without compromising the seeds' germination rate.

Meksem anticipates the project will provide crop researchers with 15 to 30 variants of each gene in the soybean genome over the grant period.

Research results are posted at www.soybeantilling.org, where scientists can search the center's collection of mutants either by gene or by physical appearance.

—by K. C. Jaehnig, Univ. Communications