Cornell and Yale universities will share a $5.5 million, four-year grant from the National Science Foundation for research to better understand the biology of rice, maize and sorghum, among other crops.

The Cornell researchers include Associate Professor Klaas van Wijk and Professor Robert Turgeon, both in the Department of Plant Biology, and Thomas Brutnell, adjunct professor and Boyce Thompson Institute for Plant Research associate scientist. They will collaborate with Cornell computational biologist Qi Sun. Timothy Nelson, professor of molecular, cellular and developmental biology at Yale Uinversity, is the project's principal investigator (PI), and Peng Liu, assistant professor of statistics at Iowa State University, is co-PI.

Specifically, the researchers will compare two categories of crops -- or grasses -- known as C3 and C4. Common C3 grasses include wheat, rye and rice. C4 grasses, which evolved from C3s, include such major cereal crops as maize and sorghum as well as the most promising biofuels crops, such as switchgrass. C4 grasses are more efficient than C3 grasses in their photosynthesis when under stress or exposed to higher temperatures and are able to create more biomass.

"Many plants are C3," said van Wijk. "We are asking what is needed for a plant to go from a C3 organization to a C4 organization. Maybe many of the components of the C4 organization are already in place in C3, and we just don't know how to turn those on." The study will provide a basic understanding of differences in cell-specific gene regulation and protein accumulation.

By understanding how these two plant types differ, the researchers will contribute to an effort led by the International Rice Research Institute to introduce C4 characteristics into a C3 species, such as rice, thereby possibly increasing both biomass and grain yields.

The project will use laser technologies to capture specific cell types in maize and rice leaves for further analysis of proteins and gene transcripts. A quantitative inventory of these molecules in each cell type will provide information regarding the regulation of gene expression and will explain how maize and rice plants differ in photosynthesis and in other cellular functions.

Researchers at Yale will be using laser technology to collect the cell types, and along with BTI researchers, they will also conduct transcript analysis. Cornell researchers will use mass spectrometry to analyze the proteins within these captured cells, will study leaf physiology of the grasses and will make a public database of the findings.