Fayetteville, Arkansas
April 24, 2008
A
University of Arkansas researcher and her colleagues have
won a joint grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture and
the Environmental Protection Agency to look at the combined
effects of global climate change on weed biology, focusing in
particular on transgenic hybrid weeds created by
cross-pollination with genetically modified crop plants. The
joint award of $520,000 is one of only four in the country.
Cindy L. Sagers, professor of biological sciences in the J.
William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences, and colleagues
at the Environmental Protection Agency and Fresno State
University will study gene flow from canola plants that have
been genetically modified to be herbicide and pesticide
resistant. Genetically modified canola, Brassica napus, has been
approved as a crop in certain states on a limited basis since
1999, but interest in it has grown because of its potential use
as a biofuel. In fact the first field trial in Arkansas for
genetically modified canola took place this winter.
However, canola has a promiscuity problem.
“Canola will hybridize with about 40 species, and one of those
is a particularly bad weed pest,” Sagers said. Thus, the crop
plant has the potential to create “superweeds” that spread and
resist efforts to get rid of them.
While working at the EPA office in Corvallis, Ore., Sagers
learned how to hand-pollinate canola and its cousin mustards so
that the researchers can study hybrids in a laboratory setting.
The researchers also began examining the problem from a
geospatial context, contacting extension agents in the northern
Midwest, consulting online flora and herbaria, mining plant
databases and funneling all of that information into a map of
the distribution of weeds that are sexually compatible with
canola.
“I learned the value of a multidisciplinary approach to solving
a well-defined problem,” Sagers said. “There were geographers,
geneticists and ecologists working on the same project.” This
research laid the ground work for the currently funded project.
For the USDA/EPA project, Sagers and her colleagues are working
with the University of Arkansas Center for Advanced Spatial
Technologies to create more detailed distribution maps of canola
and its sexually compatible relatives, focusing in particular on
field mustard Brassica rapa, which grows in every state in the
nation except Alaska.
In 2009 and 2010, they will be able to track the gene flow and
gene flow rates of genetic modifications. They seek patterns in
population biology that might make the plants more or less
likely to hybridize and create “super weeds.”
“We’re asking, ‘what is the influence of domesticated fields on
native plants?’” Sagers said.
With the distribution maps, they will be able to build
predictive models that will show what could happen with global
climate change. They will be able to show how temperature
changes might affect flowering and cross-pollination with
related plants and weeds.
Sagers’ colleagues include co-principal investigator Peter Van
De Water, department of earth and environmental sciences,
California State University, Fresno, California; and E. Henry
Lee, Connie Burdick and Jason Londo of the U.S. EPA, Western
Ecology Division, National Health and Environmental Effects
Laboratory, Corvallis, Oregon. |
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