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As the state's primary industry, Agriculture employs ~30% of Mississippians. Mississippi can be a major contributor to national security through: boosting sustainable agricultural production; optimizing forests and crops for bioenergy and bio-based products; mitigating CO2 accrual and providing safer food. <P>
To achieve these national security aspirations, and at the same time helping the MS economy, our overall program goal is to use genomics to improve our economy, climate, food and fuel security through agriculture by: <OL> <LI> Identifying genetic mechanisms for improved crop production <LI>Becoming a key hub in the nations biocomputing cyberenvironment and enabling our nation's researchers to take advantage of the revolution in genomics technologies to rapidly improve agricultural production. </ol> We will provide these solutions done by leveraging the investments made in genomic information, state-of-the-art bio-technologies and bio-computing. <P>
In this proposal a transdisciplinary team at the MSU Life Sciences and Biotechnology Institute will apply systems biology to Mississippi's opportunities in sustainable agriculture, bioenergy and bio-based products, climate and food safety; provide experimentally-derived structural and functional annotations of Mississippi's crops' genomes; provide a biocomputing cyberenvironment for value delivery from genomic data
NON-TECHNICAL SUMMARY: Agricultural commodity crops are critically important for Mississippi's economy but these crops face climatic and disease threats. In addition, because of recent economic factors (especially in energy prices) corn and soybeans, which historically have been of http://daisy.uvm.edu/efd/tsr416pt.exe[8/17/2009 9:29:42 PM] lower importance to the MS economy, have become more major economic contributors. The value of forestry is potentially increasing and yet, because the price of corn is historically high, the cost of feed for poultry and catfish is also. It is critical to help the MS economy and workforce that we focus on identifying genetic mechanisms of stress and disease resistance in these commodity crops that can be used increase production efficiency by decreasing the economic effects of climatic and disease stressors. Our objective is to provide innovative genomics and systems biology-based research solutions to address disease and climatic stressors in Mississippi's most valuable commodity crops. We will provide these solutions done by leveraging the investments made in genomic information, state-of-the-art bio-technologies and bio-computing. In this proposal a transdisciplinary team at the MSU Life Sciences and Biotechnology Institute will 1. combine functional genomics, experimental genome-annotation and bio-computation to identify how the genomes of Mississippi's most important crops function to accommodate to climate and disease stressors; 2. provide fundamental experimentally-derived structural- and functional-annotations of the genomes for Mississippi's most important crops; and 3. provide bio-computing infrastructure that can support the rapid analysis and delivery of value from genomic biology.
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APPROACH: This project will utilize second generation sequencing, high throughput proteomics, comoutational and experimental genome annotation, bioininformatic methods for functional genome annotation as well as computational systems biology modeling. Corn, soybean, cotton and rice genome accommodation to biotic stress will be quantified from seedlings at spring planting using all the methhods described above. Annotation of the same MS crop genomes will be done by transcriptomic and proteogenomic mapping will begin immediately. Physical mapping of genomic regions associated with fusiform rust resistance will be done using sequencing. We will also provide a bio-computing infrastructure that can support the rapid analysis and delivery of value from genomic biology.