Performing Department
(N/A)
Non Technical Summary
KOPESS uses an innovative and proprietary technology, called XERICO technology, to increase drought tolerance in crops. Drought is an extremely serious and recurring problem that limits crop productivity and affects the economic vitality of farmers. The major corporate seed corn companies have created a multi-billion-dollar industry based on genetically modified crops. However, drought tolerance has been difficult to effectively engineer into plants because of the complexity of plant responses to water stress. XERICO technology overcomes this barrier. Its commercial deployment will significantly improve the profitability of growers and seed companies and will benefit society by enabling crop production on arid lands.XERICO Technology is transformative compared to the current state of the art. It utilizes a plant's natural response to better protect it from drought stress. This drought tolerance mechanism is employed in a highly drought-specific manner to avoid the growth penalty often observed in drought tolerance technologies. Furthermore, XERICO-mediated drought tolerance is achieved with limited perturbation of other biological processes in the plants, which insures that drought tolerance can be achieved without disturbing normal growth. However, there are important technical risks that must be mitigated prior to commercial deployment of the technology. Its efficacy needs to be proven through field tests using XERICO transgenic seeds with clean genetic backgrounds. Using XERICO transgenic corn plants in uniform B73 backgrounds, this project will demonstrate that the technology effectively protects crops from drought damages in field conditions, thereby, reducing the technical risk and make it much more attractive to commercialization partners.
Animal Health Component
100%
Research Effort Categories
Basic
(N/A)
Applied
100%
Developmental
(N/A)
Goals / Objectives
This STTR Phase I project aims to validate the XERICO technology in an economically important crop under field conditions using transgenic lines with clean genetic backgrounds.The overall goal of this Phase I project is to reduce the technical risk of XERICO technology by demonstating that the technology effectively protects crops from drought damages and offers competitive advantages over the current and anticipated solutions in the marketplace.
Project Methods
Field experiments will be conducted at MSU Tree Research Center in East Lansing, MI during the 2023-24 growing seasons. This site has coarse textured sandy soil with low water holding capacity, ideal for imposing water stress during the growing season. Field trials will be laid out in a modified split-plot design with water availability as the whole plot treatment. Inbred and hybrid experiments will be blocked separately to minimize shading across plots, since our comparisons of interest will only be between transgenic and non-transgenic versions of the same variety. Each block will contain six randomized replications consisting of either a) two constitutive transgenic inbred lines of XERICO corn, two inducible transgenic inbred lines of XERICO corn, and a non-transgenic inbred, or b) a XERICO hybrid line, and non-transgenic hybrid lines of the same background. Each individual plot will consist of four rows spaced 30'' apart and 22'' in length, with a 3' alley separating plots. To impose the water stress treatment, one half of the field will be kept rainfed while the other irrigated using an overhead sprinkler system. This design will allow comparison of XERICO inbred and hybrid lines to their non-transgenic controls under both rainfed (water limited) and irrigated (no water limitation) conditions. Rainout shelters (see one example in Fig. 3) will be constructed and installed in rainfed plots in case of a relatively wet growing season for implementing water stress during critical stages of corn development. Rainout shelters can be specifically designed to create minimal differences in light levels, temperature, and relative humidity inside and outside of shelters. These shelters can cover whole plots or blocks, with the target of reducing available water from a given rainfall event by >50% following methods outlined by Yahdjian and Sala (2002). Soil moisture will be measured in each plot using a handheld time domain reflectometry (TDR) sensor to measure water stress levels.An Almaco SeedPro 360 precision planter with SkyTrip GPS will be used to plant each line at a seeding density of 36,000 seeds/acre, which is around 2,000 seeds higher than most commercial corn plantings in the region but selected to induce competition for soil moisture in rainfed plots. All management practices except treatments will follow regional extension recommendations for corn production. In-season measurements on 10 plants per plot (five consecutive plants in middle two rows) at biweekly intervals will include plant height, leaf count, leaf temperature via Infrared thermometer, and leaf gas exchange (including photosynthetic and transpiration rates) using a Licor-6400. At flowering, largest leaf length and width as well as anthesis and silking dates will be recorded. Before harvest, these plants will be manually harvested for plant biomass measurements, stem diameter, and grain yield parameters (ear size and weight, kernel count and weight, and kernel moisture and test weight). Final grain yield, percent moisture, and test weight at the plot level will be collected at the end of the growing season using a Kincaid 8-XP plot combine in the middle two rows of each plot.