soybean

Seed size matters: searching for a gene to make a bigger soybean

November 2, 2020 By Becca Wolf in Research Tags: CRISPR, gene expression, soybean

Bing Stacey | photo by Mariah Cox, Bond LSC

By Becca Wolf | Bond LSC

Patience is a virtue, at least it is for Bing Stacey.

Stacey recently completed a project that took her a total of eight years. It took her five years to develop a fast neutron mutant population and it took an additional three years to screen the population to identify a mutant that showed increase soybean seed size and then identifying the causative gene.

This gene, GmKIX8-1, and the seed size QTL, qSW17-1, can potentially be exploited for increasing yield in soybeans. Being able to alter these to increase seed size is important to improve the economic traits of soybeans such as yield and seed quality.

“The most important thing for farmers is the yield,” said Stacey, assistant professor of plant sciences at Bond Life Sciences Center. “For farmers, they plant soybeans, and the value or the profit they get is based on yield.”

There are two components of yield: seed size and seed quality. Stacey went to work finding what genes contribute to these components.

Mutants are very important for gene study because they have a new DNA sequence for genes. While it sounds like a sci-fi term, mutants are just plants manipulated using chemicals, radiations, or genetic modifications to change their characteristic traits in comparison to the norm. And the DNA changes to the GmKIX8-1 gene Stacey found is exactly the mutation she was looking for.

When she began this research, there were not many mutants for soybeans regarding seed size, so she had to develop her own mutant population using fast neutron irradiation.

After taking several years to develop this population, Stacey eventually found several mutants showing altered seed traits, including one showing increased seed size.

“So, we have the mutant, and then we utilized a fast and cost-effective way to genotype for changes in the DNA sequence of the mutant that is associated with the increased seed size. The genotyping method is called Comparative Genome Hybridization (CGH) which can be completed within one week and specifically detects missing DNA sequences in the mutant genome,” Stacey said.

Next, Stacey used CRISPR/Cas9 mutagenesis, which is a very powerful way to cut out specific DNA sequences in targeted genes in an organism. Before CRISPR, plant scientists could only create random mutations in plants. For example, using processes involving mutagenic chemicals and radiations, which meant one had to look at a very large number of mutants to screen for induced changes in the DNA sequence of specific genes.

Using fast neutron mutagenesis which creates deletions in bases, combined with CRISPR/Cas9, Stacey was able to characterize the role of the GmKIX8-1 gene in controlling seed size in soybeans.

“In a way, we got lucky because there is a QTL overlapping GmKIX8-1,” Stacey said. “And once you know the genetics behind a trait, then it is possible to define a possible mechanism of how the gene works, for example, how it makes soybean plants produce bigger seeds.” GmKIX8-1 controls the ability of cells to multiply. It also increases the size of the organs and the seeds of soybeans, which is exactly what Stacey was looking for.

An additional new and important thing Stacey found in her work was that GmKIX8-1 controls seed size, but not leaf size, in a dosage-dependent manner indicating that this gene is a major player in regulating seed size but not leaf size.

“This gene dosage effect on seed size and the identification of GmKIX8-1 as the causative gene behind a major seed size QTL are the novel aspects of this work,” Stacey said.

These novel aspects have been rewarding for Stacey.

“I’m quite happy, and it’s more fulfilling discovering something novel, something that hasn’t been reported before in other plants, instead of confirming what has been already reported,” Stacey said, “For example, based on what is already well-known in maize, or in rice, or in Arabidopsis, I can ask the question, ‘Does this gene also work in soybean?’ Answering this question is still worthwhile to me because maybe the gene will not work at all, or maybe it works in a different way, and that would also be novel, but to discover new genes or new explanations on how a gene works is more fulfilling.”

For more information on Bing Stacey’s work, check out the September 2020 edition of the New Phytologist Foundation article, “GmKIX8‐1 regulates organ size in soybean and is the causative gene for the major seed weight QTL qSw17‐1”

Understanding spit

October 8, 2015 By Roger Meissen in Research 6 Comments Tags: Arabidopsis, genetics, nematodes, plant sciences, soybean

Scientists find how nematodes use key hormones to take over root cells

This Arabidopsis root shows how the beet cyst nematode activates cytokinin signaling in syncytium 10 days after infection. The root fluoresces green when the TCSn gene associated with cytokinin activation is turned on because it is fused with a jellyfish protein that acts as a reporter signal. Contributed by Carola De La Torre

Roger Meissen | Bond Life Sciences Center

This is a story about spit.

Not just any spit, but the saliva of cyst nematodes, a parasite that literally sucks away billions in profits from soybean and other crops every year.

Researchers are working to uncover exactly how these tiny worms trick plant root cells into feeding them for life.

A team at the University of Missouri Bond Life Sciences Center collaborated with scientists at the University of Bonn in Germany to discover genetic evidence that the parasite uses its own version of a key plant hormone and that of the plants to make root cells vulnerable to feeding. Their research recently appeared in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Cytokinin is normally produced in plants, but these researchers determined that this growth hormone is also produced by nematode parasites that use it to take over plant root cells.

“While it’s well-known that certain bacteria and some fungi can produce and secrete cytokinin to cause disease, it’s not normal for an animal to do this,” said Melissa Mitchum, an MU plant scientist and co-author on the study. “This is the first study to demonstrate the ability of an animal to synthesize and secrete cytokinin for parasitism.”

Not Science Fiction

Reprogramming another organism might sound like a far out concept, but it’s a reality for plants susceptible to nematodes.

Cyst nematodes hatch from eggs laid in fields and quickly migrate to the roots of nearby plants. They inject nematode spit into a single host cell of soybean, beet and other crop roots.

“Imagine a hollow needle at the head of the nematode that the parasite uses to penetrate into the plant cell wall and secrete pathogenic proteins and hormone mimics,” said Carola De La Torre, a co-author of the study and plant sciences PhD student with Mitchum’s lab. “Nematodes use the spit to transform the host cell into a nutrient sink from which they feed on during their entire life cycle. This de novo differentiation process greatly depends on nematode–derived plant hormone mimics or manipulation of plant hormonal pathways caused by effector proteins present in the nematode spit.”

These effector proteins and other small molecules in their spit cause the root cell to forego normal processes and create a huge feeding site called a syncytium. In a short period of time, this causes hundreds of root cells to combine into a large nutrient storage unit that the nematode feeds from for its entire life.

Being able to convince a root cell to do the nematode’s bidding starts with a takeover of the plant host cell cycle — which regulates DNA replication and division. This implies that a plant hormone like cytokinin is involved, says Mitchum. Cytokinin normally regulates a plant’s shoot growth, leaf aging, and other cell processes.

Proving the relationship

While Mitchum’s lab had a hunch that cytokinin was key to this takeover, proving it took some creative science.

De La Torre and Demosthenis Chronis, a postdoctoral fellow MU at the Bond LSC depended on mutant Arabidopsis plants to explore the relationship. “One of the great things about using Arabidopsis as our host plant is the vast genetic resources of cytokinin and hormone mutants that are available through the scientific community,” De La Torre said.

She infected Arabidopsis that contained a reporter gene called TCSn/GFP with nematodes. This gene is associated with cytokinin responses within the plant cells and is fused with a jellyfish protein that glows green when turned on. So, De La Torre saw nematodes activated cytokinin responses in the plant early after infection when her plants emitted a green fluorescent glow under the microscope.

Next, she infected plants missing the majority of their cytokinin receptors with nematodes. Then she started counting nematodes present.

“After a careful evaluation of nematode infection, we observed less female nematodes developing in the receptor mutants compared to the wild type” De La Torre said. “The nematodes could not infect well, and that was a clear piece of evidence suggesting that cytokinin plays a main role in plant–nematode interactions.”

Another experiment looked at Arabidopsis containing a reporter gene called GUS that was fused to the regulatory sequences of the cytokinin receptor genes. All three cytokinin receptor genes were activated where the nematode was feeding.

A final experiment used a mutant that created an excess of an enzyme that degrades cytokinin, finding that a base level of plant cytokinin was also necessary for nematode growth.

“The simple statement is that the cytokinin receptors were activated in response to nematode infection and the mutants did not support growth and development of the nematodes,” Mitchum said. “This shows that if you take away the ability of the plant to recognize cytokinin the worms are unable to fully develop.”

An international collaboration

Mitchum’s team did not work alone.

The lab of Florian Grundler at Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-University of Bonn, Germany, was also on a mission to uncover if genes in the nematode controlled cytokinin activation. They had identified a key gene in the beet cyst nematode that makes the cytokinin hormone. When they took away the ability of the nematode to secrete cytokinin certain cell cycle genes were not activated at the feeding site and the nematodes did not develop. Now we know that the nematode is also secreting cytokinin to modulate the pathways.

De La Torre took that information and found the same gene in the soybean cyst nematode.

Now, Mitchum’s team is trying to find how this key gene might work differently in other nematode types, like root-knot nematode as part of a new National Science Foundation grant. They hope this will help lead to better resistance in future crops.

“Understanding how the nematode modulates its host is going to help us exploit new technologies to engineer plants with enhanced resistance to this terribly devastating pathogen,” Mitchum said. “Technology is changing all the time, we’re gaining new tools constantly, so you never know when something new is going to allow us to do something specific at the site of nematode feeding that will lead to a breakthrough.”

Mitchum is a Bond LSC investigator and an associate professor of Plant Sciences in the College of Agriculture, Food and Natural Resources. The study “A Plant Parasitic Nematode Releases Cytokinin that Control Cell Division and Orchestrate Feeding-Site Formation in Host Plants” recently was published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and was supported by the National Science Foundation (Grant #IOS-1456047 to Mitchum). The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the funding agencies.

SoyKB: Leading the convergence of wet and dry science in the era of Big Data

June 10, 2014 By Paige Blankenbuehler in Research Tags: big data, big data initiative, Bond Life Sciences, computer science, data, dry science, genetics, hightroughput data, mizzou, research, science, soybean, University of Missouri, wet science

Yaya Cui, an investigator in plant sciences at the Bond Life Sciences Center examines data on fast neuron soybean mutants that are represented on the SoyKB database.

The most puzzling scientific mysteries may be solved at the same machine you’re likely reading this sentence.

In the era of “Big Data” many significant scientific discoveries — the development of new drugs to fight diseases, strategies of agricultural breeding to solve world-hunger problems and figuring out why the world exists — are being made without ever stepping foot in a lab.

Developed by researchers at the Bond Life Sciences Center, SoyKB.org allows international researchers, scientists and farmers to chart the unknown territory of soybean genomics together — sometimes continents away from one another — through that data.

Digital solutions to real-world questions

As part of the Obama Administration’s $200 million “Big Data” Initiative, SoyKB (Soy Knowledge Base) was born.

The digital infrastructure changes the way researchers conduct their experiments dramatically, according to plant scientists like Gary Stacey, Bond LSC researcher, endowed professor of soybean biotechnology and professor of plant sciences and biochemistry.

“It’s very powerful,” Stacey said. “Humans can only look at so many lines in an excel spreadsheet — then it just kind of blurs. So we need these kinds of tools to be able to deal with this high-throughput data.”

The website, managed by Trupti Joshi, an assistant research professor in computer science at MU’s College of Engineering, enables researchers to develop important scientific questions and theories.

“There are people that during their entire career, don’t do any bench work or wet science, they just look at the data,” Stacey said.

The Gene Pathway Viewer available on SoyKB, shows different signaling pathways and points to the function of specific genes so that researchers can develop improvements for badly performing soybean lines.

“It’s much easier to grasp this whole data and narrow it down to basically what you want to focus on,” Joshi said.

A 3D-protein modeling tool lends itself especially to drug design. A pharmaceutical company could test the hypothesis and in some situations, the proposed drug turns out to yield the expected results — formulated solely by data analysis.

The Big Data initiative drives a blending of “wet science” — conducting experiments in the lab and gathering original data — and “dry science” — using computational methods.

Testament of the times?

“Oh, absolutely,” Joshi said.

Collaboration between the “wet” and “dry” sciences

Before SoyKB, data from numerous experiments would be gathered and disregarded, with only the desired results analyzed. The website makes it easy to dump all of the data gathered to then be repurposed by other researchers.

“With these kinds of databases now, all the data is put there so something that’s not valuable to me may be valuable to somebody else,” Stacey said,

Joshi said infrastructure like SoyKB is becoming more necessary in all realms of scientific discovery.

“(SoyKB) has turned out to be a very good public resource for the soybean community to cross reference that and check the details of their findings,” she said.

Computer science prevents researchers having to reinvent the wheel with their own digital platforms. SoyKB has a translational infrastructure with computational methods and tools that can be used for many disciplines like health sciences, animal sciences, physics and genetic research.

“I think there’s more and more need for these types of collaborations,” Joshi said. “It can be really difficult for biologists to handle the large scope of data by themselves and you really don’t want to spend time just dealing with files — You want to focus more on the biology, so these types of collaborations work really well.

It’s a win-win situation for everyone,” she said.

The success of SoyKB was perhaps catalyzed by Joshi. She adopted the website and the compilation of data in its infant stages as her PhD dissertation.

Joshi is unique because she has both a biology degree and a computer science background. Stacey said Joshi, who has “had a foot in each camp,” serves as an irreplaceable translator.

Most recently, the progress of SoyKB as part of the Big Data Initiative was presented at the International Conference on Bioinformatics and Biomedicine Dec. 2013 in Shanghai. The ongoing project is funded by NSF grants.

MU team narrows search for parasite that destroys soybean yields

September 30, 2013 By Roger Meissen in Research Tags: soybean

Henry Nguyen‘s progress to identify the genes responsible for root-knot nematode is garnering some attention. The Bond LSC and CAFNR plant scientist helps find genetic candidates for the disease, as explained in this recent CAFNR story by Randy Mertens.

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A team of scientists from the University of Missouri, the University of Georgia and the Beijing Genome Institute have used next-generation sequencing to identify two genes — out of approximately 50,000 possibilities — that defend soybeans from damage caused by the root-knot nematode (RKN) parasite. This parasite causes millions of dollars in yield losses each year in the United States.

This is the first time the process has been used in soybean research. Using another genetic technique, the team is now working to identify the specific gene that prevents RKN from infecting the soybean. With this knowledge, resistant soybean varieties or cultivars can be bred for farmers.

RKN-infected roots are stunted and darker in color than healthy roots and have fewer nitrogen-fixing nodules. Attached SCN females may be visible as shiny white or yellow spherical bodies on the roots. Courtesy Fisher Delta Research Center, Missouri Agricultural Experiment Station.

Researchers believe that this process also can be applied to other crops to map genes important for traits, such as yield and stress responses, said Henry Nguyen, director of the National Center for Soybean Biotechnology (NCSB), housed at the MU College of Agriculture, Food and Natural Resources.

The discovery was recently published in theProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The research was funded by the Missouri Soybean Merchandising Council.

A Silent Killer of Profits

The root-knot nematode is a microscopic roundworm that can become a parasite on an enormous variety of crop species including the soybean, potato, sugar beet, rice, coconut palm, banana, pepper, tobacco, watermelon, tomato and peanut. It is one of the three most economically damaging plant parasites worldwide, causing an average worldwide yield loss of 5 percent, Nguyen said.

J. Grover Shannon, associate director of the NCSB and David M. Haggard Endowed Chair of Soybean Breeding at MU, estimates that RKN and other nematodes (excluding soybean cyst nematode) accounts for annual losses of more than $50 million in soybean yield in the United States. The U.S. is the world’s largest producer of soybeans, growing more than 3 billion bushels, or 33 percent of the world’s production. The value of the 2011 U.S. soybean crop exceeded $35.7 billion. U.S. soybean and soy product exports exceeded $21.5 billion in 2011.

Jinrong Wan, MU research scientist, said RKN larvae infect plant roots, causing the formation of root-knot galls that drain the plant’s photosynthate and other nutrients. Infection of young plants may be lethal, while infection of mature plants causes decreased yield.

RKN is a silent killer of profits, Wan continued. Often, it thrives as a parasite throughout a growing season in annuals, or over many years in perennial crops, without any above-ground signs or symptoms. Only when harvest is over and yield has been quantified is the parasite’s damage commonly seen.

No method currently used effectively controls RKN. Crop rotation is a typical technique, but with incomplete results because RKN can live for a long time and can infect an enormous variety of plants. Nematicides are another intervention, but are dangerous to the respiratory systems of animals. Biological control is practiced in some cropping systems, with two organisms showing only limited success. Clearly the most efficient method of control is by using resistant cultivars, said Nguyen.

A Faster and Better Assay

Nguyen said next-generation sequencing technology is a new and important tool for plant scientists.

Currently, scientists use single nucleotide polymorphisms to map genetic markers to determine what genes are responsible for important traits, such as disease resistance. That process, said Nguyen, is too slow considering the tens of thousands of genes that have to be surveyed.

To speed up the process, Nguyen’s team used Next-Generation Sequencing Technology to sequence the whole genome of more than 200 soybean inbred lines. Another advantage of using this method is that the mapping resolution can be significantly improved – the genes can be narrowed down to a very small chromosome region quickly, Tri Vuong, MU research scientist, added.

This story was originally posted on CAFNR News where you can find on MU agriculture research.