College of Agriculture and Life Sciences
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Microbiologist Works to Better China's Water Quality
Students Adopt Strawberry Mutants
Teaching Character and Learning from It, Too
Building Partnerships with Urban Boarding Schools
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Students Adopt Strawberry Mutants
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| Professor Richard Veilleux meets his students in the greenhouse to evaluate the progress of the strawberry plants. |
Adopt a cute puppy or kitten maybe, but a strawberry plant? Students in the Advanced Plant Breeding and Genetics course taught by Richard Veilleux were asked to do just that, by adopting strawberry mutants. As part of their laboratory experience, students learned the latest plant transformation techniques and contributed to a research study on plant genetics.
Veilleux and his colleague, Vladimir Shulaev, associate professor at the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute, have been studying Fragaria vescca, the diploid woodland strawberry, as an attractive model for research on fruit-crop genetics.
| "We might be able to manipulate the fruit to have more of the desirable compounds if we know what genes control the compounds," says Richard Veilleux. |
Veilleux, a professor of horticulture, explains that the project goal is to understand the function of native strawberry genes, regardless of which traits they control. The woodland strawberry was picked because of its relatively small genome size and rapid life cycle (four months to six months).
“If you are going to map a plant with a large genome, it is a formidable task because much of that large genome is just repetitive DNA that really has no genes in it,” says Veilleux. “You would spend a lot of time mapping non-coding sequences. So using a plant with a smaller genome is easier, because you get to the genes faster.”
The students enrolled in the laboratory course used a new procedure developed by Veilleux and his colleagues to transfer specific DNA sequences into the strawberry genome to create their mutant strawberry plants. They inserted DNA sequences from Agrobacterium tumefaciens, a natural plant pathogen, into the strawberry genome.
“As a pathogen, Agrobacterium inserts a piece of its DNA into the genome of the host,” explains Veilleux. “So the whole Agrobacterium transformation procedure has been developed to exploit that natural transformation by taking the pathogenic gene out of the Agrobacterium and instead placing the genes you want in its place. This is used to change a particular trait in a plant. In our case we just put some marker genes in there so we could trace the progress of the transformation procedure.” The two genes that the group used were ones for antibiotic resistance and green fluorescent protein (GFP) from jellyfish.
Due to the nature of the genes the team used in the study, it was easy to tell visually whether or not the plants had been transformed. “When the transformed shoots get to be approximately 1 cm in length, you can transfer them onto a root-inducing medium to grow plantlets from them,” says Veilleux. “Then we check them to see if the emerging roots express the GFP, and if they do, they are transformed plants that we take to the greenhouse and self-pollinate them to obtain seeds.”
Veilleux hopes that their work will lead to the ability to design a more nutritional fruit with more health-enhancing antioxidants. “We might be able to manipulate the fruit to have more of the desirable compounds if we know what genes control the compounds,” he says.
Veilleux and Shulaev’s research was initially funded by a Virginia Tech ASPIRES grant (A Support Program for Innovative Research Strategies), and the student laboratory project was supported with funding by an Innovative Teaching Grant from the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences.