A team of ISU researchers received a $2 million grant from the National Science Foundation to continue work studying disease defense in agricultural crops.

Roger Wise, a U.S. Department of Agriculture collaborating professor of plant pathology, said the research project, which includes five doctoral students, three undergraduates and one postdoctoral research associate, focuses on isolating and studying plant genes that allow crops to resist disease.

“By conducting this research, we hope to contribute to disease defense in important crops,” Wise said.

Wise said the process starts when the researchers introduce powdery mildew, a fungal pathogen, to barley plants. The researchers then harvest the leaves at predetermined time points that coincide with fungal infection.

Ribonucleic acid is isolated from the plants and hybridized to the Barley1 GeneChip, a technology platform that allows the investigation of 22,000 genes in a single experiment. Each species of RNA combines with complimentary strands of DNA that produce a signal that is quantified by a laser scanner.

Wise said analyzing the data from the Barley 1 GeneChip tells the researchers which genes may be involved in disease resistance and are worth investigating further.

The researchers will then test the genes to see if they do, in fact, contribute to disease resistance.

“All of the data we collect will go into a worldwide database,” he said, “so anyone can access our data and use it.”

The database is headed by Julie Dickerson, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering.

Wise said the researchers submitted their 15-page proposal to the National Science Foundation in October of 2004, and the grant was awarded to the team in June.

Steven Whitham, assistant professor of plant pathology and member of the research team, said he was thrilled when the team was awarded the grant.

“It’s unusual to be awarded that much for any project,” he said.

Most grants of this nature fund projects for three years, Whitham said, but this grant will cover the researchers’ needs for four years.

The project is still in its early stages, he said, but some of the researchers have already been working on the project for some time.

“We’d worked on the project for several years and we already have some great preliminary data,” he said.

Daniel Nettleton, associate professor of statistics and a researcher working on the project, said he hopes to develop new statistical methods in addition to contributing to the project’s goal of studying plant disease resistance.

Nettleton said the project needs a statistician to determine if the differences among the plant samples results from the researcher’s treatment, or if the differences can be attributed to chance.

He said the statistical work on the project could be considered groundbreaking because the project will deal with thousands of plant samples.

“As a statistician, I hope I get to solve some problems and develop some better methods for analysis of this kind of data on this large of a scale,” he said.