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Our research
goals fall into three major areas.
The first is to conduct
practical research that facilitates the commercialization of
new products and provides benefits for the seed industry. For
example, we are currently conducting a project to evaluate
pollen flow from transgenic cotton varieties. While cotton is
generally considered to be self-pollinating, pollen can be
moved by insects, potentially contaminating crops that are
expected to be free from transgenes. Knowing the distances
that pollen can be expected to move under different conditions
in California can help growers produce seeds or commodities
that meet specific market requirements. Another practical
project is to develop a web-based GIS mapping system for seed
growers to use in coordinating isolation distances. We are
also supporting an economic study of the California seed
industry to provide data on its scope and economic impact.
A second goal is to provide tools and
resources to facilitate the transfer of new technologies from
the large-scale agronomic crops to the diversity of crops
important in California. The SBC was instrumental in
establishing a Plant Transformation Facility at UC Davis. This
new facility will focus on producing transgenic plants to
support the research programs of UC faculty, but is also
available to outside clients. One goal of the facility is to
collect and/or develop protocols to successfully transform the
diversity of crops grown in California. The SBC is also
involved in efforts to increase public access to enabling
technologies for small-market crops and humanitarian use.
A third and more fundamental goal of
the SBC is to ensure that Californian crops do not lag behind
in the application of biotechnology. As research advances in
model systems such as Arabidopsis and rice, the SBC will
conduct research that facilitates the application of this
expanding genomic knowledge to the improvement of other crops.
We are initiating a project in tomato to develop a deletion
mutant population that would allow plants having mutations in
specific known genes to be identified. This could be an
alternative to transgenic approaches to gene silencing, for
example, and will aid in functional genomics studies. |
