Bond LSC principal investigators Bing Yang (left) and Ron Mittler were once again recognized on the list of Highly Cited Researchers. | photos by Roger Meissen, Bond LSC
By Roger Meissen | Bond LSC
Discoveries in research come with time, so the incremental accumulation of knowledge toward breakthroughs is fundamental to science and the future.
While many contribute to this understanding, a few scientists consistently produce research that others note more often in their own experiments. Two University of Missouri Bond Life Sciences Center researchers once again landed on that list of most cited scientists.
Bing Yang and Ron Mittler are included on the list of Highly Cited Researchers for 2023. The inclusion stems from authoring multiple highly cited publications in 2023 that rank in the top 1% by citations for their field.
This year marks the fifth straight year of inclusion in the list for Yang and the fourth year running for Mittler.
Only one in every 1,000 scientists receive this honor, and they join 6,849 researchers globally who made the Clarivate list. Clarivate runs Web of Science, a database aggregating published, peer-reviewed research from academic journals, conference proceedings and other citations.
Yang, a Bond LSC scientist and MU professor of Plant Science and Technology, works on targeted genome editing in plant species, including rice, maize, wheat, sorghum and soybeans. His lab aims to understand interactions between plants and pathogens like bacterial blight in rice so they can work toward varieties that can better withstand the disease, among other projects.
Mittler, a Bond LSC scientist and MU Curators’ Distinguished Professor of Plant Science and Technology, researches the role of reactive oxygen species (ROS) and its function in regulating biological processes in plants.
Bond LSC scientist works with global consortium to eliminate costly rice disease
Rice terraces in Sapa, Vietnam: Rice is the world’s most important food plant, playing a vital role for nutrition in Asia and Africa in particular. In those countries, rice is generally grown by small farmers. If their fields are infected by bacterial blight, their very existence is threatened. | Photo by HHU / Sarah M. Schmidt
By Mariah Cox | Bond LSC
COLUMBIA, Mo. – Deep in the basement of the Bond Life Sciences Center is a small room emanating neon purple light. The room houses rice plants that have helped researchers develop a tool to identify different variations of rice disease and engineer disease-resistant crops.
The “Healthy Crops” research consortium, led by Heinrich Heine University in Düsseldorf, Germany, published two studies recently in Nature Biotechnology that introduced new genetic rice variants for broad-spectrum resistance to bacterial blight of rice and a diagnostic kit to track down different types of bacteria and rightly plant blight-resistant variety. Rice blight is a bacterial crop disease that causes plant death and significantly reduces rice yields in South Asia and Africa.
Bing Yang, a joint faculty member at the University of Missouri Bond Life Sciences Center and the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center, studies that room full of plants in Bond LSC as it operates on a 12-hour night and day schedule using lightbulbs that are energy efficient and don’t give off a lot of heat, thus producing the neon glow. Scientists from his group were key collaborators on the project. The researchers specifically want to distribute their blight-resistant rice varieties and diagnostic tool to small farmers in the developing world.
Bing Yang joined Bond LSC as a primary investigator in Sept. 2018 as a joint hire with the Donald Danforth Plant Sciences Center. | photos by Erica Overfelt and Roger Meissen, Bond LSC
“Bacteria happen in the field naturally and they keep infecting new plant leaves. The bacteria kill the plant and once the plant dies, there is little to no yield from it,” said Yang. “Resistance gene is the only effective way to control the disease, and antibiotics are pretty expensive and ineffective to use to kill the bacteria in the field.”
Globally, rice is the most important food crop that feeds 56% of the world’s population. Rice blight is a threat to crop production and the livelihoods of small farmers with little acreage in developing countries. For example, on average, $3.6 billion is lost annually in India due to bacterial blight. Heavy rain and monsoon seasons often accelerate problems with blight as it can spread via flood water.
The five-year collaboration includes researchers from across the globe at the University of Missouri, University of Florida, Heinrich Heine University in Düsseldorf, Germany, the Institut de Recherche pour le Développement in France, and the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines.
Because of rice’s importance as a global food staple, the Healthy Crops consortium scientists sought to find a way to help farmers avoid planting crops that are susceptible to the disease. To do this, they came up with the idea of using chemicals as a dye agent that, when applied to the plant, can tell the farmer what specific form of the bacteria is in their field. From this information, the farmers can then plant a crop that is resistant to that specific strain of bacteria.
The implications for this technology mean cheaper methods of combating the effects of rice blight and allowing farmers to yield more rice annually, thus supporting their livelihoods and feeding those in developing countries.
“Bacteria blight of rice is a big challenge, but we naturally work well together and by combining multiple expertise we have been able to tackle the problem,” Yang said.
Moving forward, the researchers are working to further develop the tool and disease-resistant seeds to get them into the hands of small farmers.
Ultimately, the research has also allowed them to understand a way to block the acquisition of a nutrient by the bacteria from the host. Once the bacteria infect the rice plant, they secrete proteins into the rice cells turning on the plants’ SWEET genes. SWEETs export sugar from the rice cells and make it available to the bacteria which feed on it in the cell wall space. From there, the bacteria have enough resources to multiply and cause the plant to die.
Some rice varieties are resistant against rice blight bacteria because they contain different variants of the SWEET promoters which do not allow the bacteria’s proteins to turn on the genes. However, the bacteria can adapt and attack rice plants with different variations. In the second paper published by the consortium, the researchers developed a series of variants from two popular rice varieties that are resistant to a large number of bacterial strains.
By understanding the disease biology to develop disease-resistant plants, the researchers can help reduce the yield loss, increase the productivity of rice plants and benefit farmers.
Bing Yang is a joint faculty member of the MU Bond Life Sciences Center and the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center in St. Louis.
Wes Warren (left), Bing Yang (middle) and Ron Mittler (right) recently joined Bond LSC as primary investigators. | photos by Erica Overfelt and Roger Meissen, Bond LSC
By Roger Meissen | Bond LSC
Like with any family, a new addition brings possibility and excitement.
For Bond LSC, three new faculty promise to enrich research at the University of Missouri by working together across disciplines. Ron Mittler, Wes Warren and Bing Yang all joined Bond LSC recently to continue their research careers.
Bond LSC Interim Director Walter Gassmann said these strategic hires are years in the making and represent how departments and centers come together with a unified goal for MU.
“These are some of the first hires we’ve completed specifically looking at how new faculty could bridge individual research strengths that exist on campus,” he said. “These scientists can bring those strengths together to go in a new direction, and Bond LSC is the perfect place for these faculty to achieve their goals.”
Each researcher comes with a reputation that precedes him. It only takes one look at the framed covers of Nature Magazine lined up in a row in Wes Warren’s office to see evidence of that. The comparative geneticist was recruited from Washington University and has published work in Nature that sequenced the genomes of animals from the orangutan and the gibbon to the elephant shark and the platypus.
“My passion is to crack the black box of the genome and try to find weird and unique traits of various animals,” Warren said. “It’s not enough now to sequence a genome and compare it to others, you have to dig deeper, do wet lab work and try to validate your findings.”
His shared appointment as a Bond LSC investigator and professor of genomics in the Department of Animal Sciences, College of Agriculture, Food and Natural Resources, in conjunction with the School of Medicine, College of Veterinary Medicine and the MU Informatics Institute, gives him the opportunity to more easily move his research forward.
“My thought is that I can act as a liaison between researchers in these areas,” he said. “I want to keep in mind trait evolution and use that divergence in traits to practice evolutionary comparative medicine to think about disease in humans and companion animals.”
Yang brings a different expertise from Iowa State University where he spent years studying bacterial diseases of rice. His joint appointment as a professor of plant sciences comes from a partnership with the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center in St. Louis. His research began by looking at plant disease from the bacterial side, but has evolved to also study its host’s interaction.
“Over half the world’s population eats rice as a staple food and by understanding its basic biology we can engineer better rice varieties with disease resistance and yield improvements,” Yang said. “This joint appointment gives me a bigger scientific community and access to more tools to continue my former research while thinking about some high risk, high reward projects that no one has done before.”
Mittler brings a different expertise in plant science to Bond LSC. Most recently at the University of North Texas, his work focused on cell-to-cell communication and how plants respond to multiple stressors — like heat and drought — at the same time. To do this, Mittler studies proteins with unknown functions. One he identified in plants deals with reactive oxygen species, which is a type of oxygen that becomes activated and can cause damage within cells in its toxic forms.
“We don’t really know what 20 percent of the proteins in our body do and in plants it’s more than that,” he said. “One of them was very interesting to me because it responded to reactive oxygen species in Arabidopsis plants, and we found out that a close relative of this protein is found in humans and accumulates to high levels in cancer cells.”
This has led Mittler to expand his work into mammalian cells and will encourage partnerships outside of plant science. With the cancer connection in mind, Mittler has a joint appointment in the Department of Surgery in the School of Medicine
“This is one of the few places in the U.S. that has a medical school, a veterinary school, college of agriculture and a nuclear reactor, so you have a lot of resources available to you, and here I have access to crop fields I didn’t have before and people who do a lot of crop physiology,” Mittler said. “The biggest thing I’ve found here so far is that there is a big drive for collaboration and the walls and barriers between different departments are low. Not a lot of places have this kind of attitude.”
The emphasis on connections across disciplines is key to the larger research goals within the University of Missouri System.
“It’s the research community, the facilities and resources that convince excellent researchers like these to join our research enterprise, and Bond LSC is the perfect place to have faculty from five colleges bump into each other on a daily basis,” said Mark McIntosh, vice chancellor of research, graduate studies and economic development at MU and vice president of research and economic development for the UM System. “Collaborative research is more competitive when it comes to grant applications to federal agencies, and is more likely to lead to innovations and economic development. Our success with interdisciplinary collaborations — like those in the Bond LSC — is the motivation for our focus on building the Translational Precision Medicine Complex (TPMC). I look forward to seeing how our new Bond LSC investigators can build and nurture these partnerships.”
From his childhood in China where his father farmed the crop to more than 20 years of research on the staple, it’s more than just food.
“Rice by itself is the major crop in the world,” said Yang, one of Bond LSC’s newest researchers. “It provides more than half of the population’s food. Rice is a model crop species and can be used for other crop plants. It can be applicable to other crop species since it is easy to study.”
Originally from Southwestern China, Yang initially went to college at Southwest Forestry College in China and later came to the U.S. for the opportunity to further his education. He studied bacterial blight in rice at Kansas State University and received his Ph.D. in Plant Pathology. He continued this research at Iowa State University where studied genome editing, eventually becoming a professor in Genetics, Development and Cell Biology. He joined MU as a professor of Plant Sciences and joint hire for the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center and Bond LSC.
“I worked at ISU for 12 years and my research in my lab used bacterial blight in rice as a model system,” Yang said. “I started looking at rice from bacterial side and then expanded to look at the host interaction. The possibility for new discovery keeps me excited about the work.”
Bacterial blight is a deadly disease that can kill up to 75 percent of a rice crop. While Yang focuses on this pathogen, his research can expand understanding of the molecular mechanisms behind various plant diseases in a number of crops. Yang hopes his genome editing paves a way to create a more disease resistant plant.
“Especially with the advanced technology we can engineer some crop and rice varieties with better resistance,” Yang said.
But this research is more than new discoveries, it’s a part of who Yang is.
“Rice and the disease relate to my background,” Yang said. “I am from a family in a southwest province of China where we were rice farmers.”
While his lab area may be bare for now, in a few months’ new advances will come with getting his lab up and running on the third floor of Bond LSC.
“It is a challenge to move the whole lab,” Yang said. “But another aspect for this move is we can do some high risk projects. This means nobody has done it before. High risk also means high possibility for failure.”
But failure doesn’t scare Yang.
“Science always means some success, but you also have to fail for scientific research,” Yang said. “To me, science means using some approach or tool to uncover the mystery behind how to make something better.”
