Beyond their service in elucidating the biology of other life forms, plants are of course worth study in their own right. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner come to mind. On the food front, HHMI supports plant research that could lead to hardier, more abundant crops—particularly in developing countries. With the world population expected to grow by 2­-3 billion over the next 30 years, many regions could struggle to feed residents. “We urgently need more and better food,” says HHMI international research scholar Luis Herrera Estrella, head of Mexico's National Laboratory of Genomics for Biodiversity of the Center for Research and Advanced Studies at the National Polytechnic Institute in Mexico City.

Estrella is working to develop transgenic plants that grow in acid soils, which represent roughly a third of the world's arable land. In Latin America, he says, more than 450 million hectares of land are highly acidic yet otherwise prime for farming, with a good growing climate and available water. Acid soil contains toxic levels of aluminum, which inhibits the roots of growing plants, and low amounts of phosphorous, an essential plant nutrient. Rather than fight the poor soil, most farmers in the region simply allow cattle to graze on marginal pastures. Those that do plant crops such as corn and soybeans must apply costly amounts of lime and fertilizer.

If growers could cultivate crops on this acid soil, Estrella says, food production in Latin America could jump by 50 percent. With that goal, he and his colleagues have studied plants naturally adapted to acid soils, pinpointing their molecular talents for tolerating aluminum and efficiently using phosphorous. His lab is also working to design plants with shallow, highly branched root systems that can more efficiently use fertilizer in diverse kinds of soils. “If we can produce new plant varieties or hybrids that require less fertilizer,” he says, “we could cut farm costs, make agriculture more sustainable, and reduce harm to the environment.” The team is headed in that direction, with recent studies that identified key regulatory and metabolic genes that allow some varieties of maize and Arabidopsis to thrive in low-phosphate soils.

Despite their prodigious value to humans, sometimes plants can cause human health problems. HHMI investigator Daphne Preuss, who is one of HHMI's first plant biologists, and her colleagues at the University of Chicago have recently identified genes that code for proteins that coat the pollen of Arabidopsis, a finding that is helping scientists learn how plants recognize pollen from their own species. Building on that research, Preuss is now working to identify the molecules within pollen that trigger allergies. This line of research, funded in part by the Arabidopsis 2010 Project (see sidebar), could lead to more effective treatments for the beleaguered millions who are allergic to airborne pollen.

Back at Salk, Joanne Chory shifts her gaze skyward to explore how plants respond to different light environments. In particular, Chory focuses on signaling by brassinosteroids, plant-steroid hormones that are critical regulators of development in virtually all plant cells, including seeds, flowers, roots, leaves, stems, pollen, and young vegetative tissue. Because brassinosteroids control cell growth, they help determine whether a plant becomes a dwarfed knot of green, say, or a sleek stalk stretching high.

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