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News & Announcements
• Organic conversion grants offered
• Grants available to fund waste cleanup
• California agriculture secretary to address pesticide-awareness group
• Funding applications being accepted
• Water audit applications available
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Research Updates
Press releases distributed by the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Agricultural Research Service, the principal intramural scientific research agency of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
• Engineers develop machine to inspect and sort strawberry plants
• Livestock Can Help Rangelands Recover from Fires
• Drug Eliminates Parasite that Causes Babesiosis in Horses
• Web-based innovation improves agricultural terrace design
• Potential biocontrols found for arundo
• Well water should be tested annually to reduce health risks to children
• Honeybees are on the rise but demand grows faster
• Synthetic chemical offers solution for crops facing drought
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Organic conversion grants offered
The USDA's Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) has extended the timeline to apply for a special $2 million Organic Initiative, available through the agency's Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP). Organic producers and those transitioning to organic now have until March 12, 2010, to apply for the current round of funding consideration.
Producers awarded contracts under this initiative will receive up to 75 percent of the average cost of conservation practices, rather than the usual 50 percent. Beginning farmers, limited resource farmers, and individuals who are members of socially disadvantaged groups may receive up to 90 percent cost share. Organic and transitioning producers can receive up to $20,000 per year or $80,000 over six years through this initiative. Organic producers may also apply for assistance under general EQIP.
"The Farm Bill provides a special focus on assisting organic and transitioning producers and we look forward to working more closely with this group of farmers with whom we believe we share a strong conservation ethic," said Ed Burton, State Conservationist for NRCS in California.
The Organic Initiative in California includes cost share for more than two dozen conservation practices, including conservation crop rotation, cover crop, nutrient management, pest management, prescribed grazing, and the new pilot practice, high tunnels.
For more information, contact Brooks Engelhardt, NRCS district conservationist for Ventura County, at (805) 386-4489, Ext. 101.
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Grants available to fund waste cleanup
The Farm and Ranch Solid Waste Cleanup and Abatement Grant Program provides funding from the California Integrated Waste Management Board (CIWMB) for the cleanup of illegal solid waste sites on farm or ranch property. Grants are limited to $50,000 per cleanup or abatement project, with a limit of $200,000 per year for each eligible applicant.
Interested landowners should contact Marty Melvin at (805) 386-4489, Ext. 108, or marty.melvin@vcrcd.org.
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California agriculture secretary to address pesticide-awareness group
A.G. Kawamura, secretary of the California Department of Food and Agriculture, will deliver the keynote address March 3 at the second annual Spray Safe event in Ventura.
The event, which will be at the Ventura County Fairgrounds from 8 a.m. to 1:15 p.m., is free and open to the public, but advance registration is required. To reserve a spot, download the registration form here and fax it to (805) 987-3874. The deadline is Feb. 26.
Spray Safe is intended to prevent pesticide-exposure incidents and improve communication among growers, chemical applicators and farm employees. Originally developed by a coalition of farmers, pest control advisers, applicators and labor contractors concerned about drift incidents in Kern County, the program is being embraced by growers throughout California as a way of better protecting the health and safety of farmers, field crews and neighboring residents.
The Ventura County program has been developed by a coalition of local farmers, pesticide applicators, labor contractors and other members of the agricultural community. Last year’s inaugural Spray Safe event in Ventura drew more than 400 people.
The March 3 program will feature educational presentations, equipment displays, exhibits and a barbecue lunch. In addition to Kawamura, featured speakers will include Ventura Agricultural Commissioner Henry Gonzales; Rob Roy, president of the Ventura County Agricultural Association; and Scott Deardorff, immediate past president of the Farm Bureau of Ventura County. Spanish translation will be provided.
Mr. Kawamura has been secretary of the California Department of Food and Agriculture since November 2003. He chairs the Specialty Crop Task Force of the National Association of State Departments of Agriculture, and he is a member of the USDA Fruit and Vegetable Industry Advisory Committee. He is the immediate past president of the Western Association of State Departments of Agriculture. Prior to his appointment, he was active as a produce grower and shipper from Orange County, where his third-generation farming family still grows strawberries, green beans and other specialty crops. Secretary Kawamura has a bachelor's degree in comparative literature from UC Berkeley.
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Diesel deadline approaching
The deadline is fast approaching for agricultural operators to take advantage of a special provision granting them additional time to comply with tough new air-quality regulations for diesel tucks.
The regulation, intended to significantly reduce emissions from existing on-road diesel vehicles, was adopted Dec. 12, 2008, by the California Air Resources Board (ARB). It requires owners of most heavy-duty diesel trucks to install soot traps on exhaust pipes of their vehicles or take them off the road starting in 2011.
Agricultural vehicles have longer to comply. Most farm trucks have until Jan. 1, 2017, to meet the standard. Trucks used less frequently — under 10,000 miles annually — have until Jan. 1, 2023.
Vehicles that qualify for the special agricultural provision are defined by the ARB as “those vehicles that are used exclusively in agricultural and forest operations, those used exclusively to transport agricultural products to the first point of processing after harvest, and certain heavy-duty vehicles that exclusively deliver fertilizer or crop protection products from a distribution center to farms.”
To qualify for the special compliance timetable, however, farmers and ranchers must report to ARB by March 31 which of their vehicles will be designated as agricultural vehicles.
Reporting forms and more information about the program are available by clicking here.
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Another equipment survey
California Farm Bureau Federation is asking members to take 15-20 minutes to fill out a survey about their off-road equipment. This information will help set the stage for discussions with the California Air Resources Board as it begins work on a new rule that eventually will require gradually upgrading self-propelled agricultural field equipment of 25 horsepower or larger.
Many Farm Bureau members filled out on-road truck surveys in 2008 and those responses were crucial in helping create flexible regulations for the agricultural community in the impending on-road diesel truck rule.
This new survey is completely separate and for a different purpose than the one used to develop the on-road diesel truck rule. The deadline for submitting completed surveys is Feb. 15. Since other agricultural organizations are also conducting this survey, it’s important for those who belong to more than one association to fill out the survey only once.
There are three surveys: one for growers, one for 100 percent custom operators and one for first point processors. Agricultural producers who also operate custom business should only complete the agricultural producer survey. First point of processing facilities include packinghouses, cotton gins, nut hullers and processors, as well as dehydrators and feed and grain mills. The processor survey form includes a more detailed definition.
The survey may be completed online by clicking here.
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Funding applications being accepted
The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) is accepting applications for the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP), Agricultural Water Enhancement Program (AWEP) and Wildlife Habitat Incentives Program (WHIP).
Through the EQIP program, cost sharing and technical assistance are available for developing and implementing conservation plans addressing soil erosion, water quality, runoff management, rangeland improvement, wildlife habitat and implementation of pest, nutrient and water management.
Through the AWEP program, funding is available for irrigation evaluations, irrigation management, and installation of some structural practices to address water conservation.
The WHIP program offers funding to create, enhance or restore wildlife habitat.
Applications are accepted on a year-round basis. For more information, contact the NRCS service center at 3380 Somis Road, Somis, (805) 386-4489.
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Water audit applications available
The Ventura County Resource Conservation District is now offering water-efficiency evaluations for agricultural irrigation systems. The program is sponsored in part by the Ventura County Agricultural Irrigated Lands Group.
The RCD’s mobile irrigation lab provides an initial test to measure distribution uniformity (DU), or how evenly the irrigation system is applying irrigation water. If the initial test indicates the distribution uniformity is less than required for good irrigation practices, additional tests and analysis can be performed to determine the cause, and recommendations made to improve irrigation system performance.
The Mobile Lab will evaluate sprinkler, micro-sprinkler and drip irrigation systems for both agriculture and large landscape projects. Potential benefits include:
· Increased application efficiency
· Increased yields
· Increased profits
· More efficient energy use
· Decreased nutrient and chemical leaching
· Decreased tailwater runoff
· Healthier crops, resulting in fewer pest problems
Evaluations are free for VCAILG members. For more information about the program, or to schedule an evaluation, contact Vic Akundzadeh, irrigation technician, at (805) 216-3641 or vic.akund@gmail.com.
Engineers develop machine to inspect and sort strawberry plants
Source: American Association for the Advancement of Science
Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University's National Robotics Engineering Center (NREC) have developed a plant-sorting machine that uses computer vision and machine learning to inspect and grade harvested strawberry plants and then mechanically sort them by quality — tasks that until now could only be done manually.
In a successful field test this fall, the machine classified and sorted harvested plants more consistently and faster than workers could, with a comparable error rate.
"We're looking forward to using the system," said Liz Ponce, CEO of Lassen Canyon Nursery in Redding, Calif., one of five strawberry plant producers sponsoring the NREC project. "All of our stakeholders feel that it has a lot of potential." The other sponsors are Driscoll Nursery Associates; Nor Cal Nursery, Inc.; Plant Sciences, Inc.; and Crown Nursery LLC. Together, the five producers represent about 85 percent of the California strawberry plant nursery market.
To maintain good strawberry yields, commercial berry growers must replace their plants every year. During the fall harvest season, strawberry plant nursery farms use manual labor to sort several hundred million strawberry plants into good and bad categories — a tedious and costly process.
The strawberry plant sorter uses computer vision to examine harvested plants that pass by on a conveyor belt. The sorter's novel machine learning algorithms allow it to be taught how to classify strawberry plants of different sizes, varieties and stages of growth, beyond the simple classification of good and bad plants. This introduces dramatic new efficiencies for strawberry nursery farms, helping them improve quality, streamline production and deliver better strawberry plants to berry growers, which in turn produces better strawberries for consumers.
"The sorter can adapt to plants that vary from year to year, or even within the same growing season," said Christopher Fromme, the project's manager and lead engineer. "It's very flexible."
During a 10-day field test in October, NREC engineers tested the strawberry plant sorter under realistic conditions, where rain and frost change plants' appearance, and roots may contain mud and debris. The prototype system had to sort plants of different varieties and levels of maturity. While in the field, it sorted more than 75,000 strawberry plants. On average, it sorted 5,000 plants per hour, several times faster than human sorting. The NREC hopes to achieve sorting rates of 20,000-30,000 plants per hour with the final system. While the sorter's overall error rate was close to that of human workers, it inspected and sorted plants more consistently.
"That's the beauty of it," Ponce said. "Hand sorting varies more and has more drift in quality." The successful field trial concludes phase two of a five-phase program that will develop a machine ready for commercial operations. Phase three will develop better methods to separate harvested strawberry plants for inspection, improve the sorter's robustness and ease of use, and integrate it into the nurseries' harvesting and packaging processes.
Livestock Can Help Rangelands Recover from Fires
Source: Agricultural Research Service
A 14-year study by Agricultural Research Service (ARS) scientists in Oregon found that rangelands that have been grazed by cattle recover from fires more effectively than rangelands that have been protected from livestock. These surprising findings could impact management strategies for native plant communities where ecological dynamics are shifting because of climate change, invasive weeds and other challenges.
Much of the rangeland in the western United States is threatened by the spread of cheatgrass and medusahead, invasive non-native annual grasses that fuel wildfires and readily infest landscapes, especially after fires. These rangelands historically were burned by wildfires every 50 to 100 years, but over the past century these fires have been suppressed by humans. This suppression allowed some dead plant litter to accumulate, but when cattle were introduced to the region, their grazing helped keep litter accumulation in check.
Rangeland scientists Kirk Davies and Jon Bates and research leader Tony Svejcar, who work in the ARS Range and Meadow Forage Management Research Unit at the Eastern Oregon Agricultural Research Center in Burns, Ore., carried out studies comparing how native plants on grazed and ungrazed sagebrush rangelands recovered from fires. All the sites had similar vegetation profiles and were virtually free of cheatgrass.
In the grazed areas, cattle consumed around 40 percent of the available forage, which removed much of the potential litter. The ungrazed sites, where livestock had been excluded since 1936, had almost twice as much litter as the grazed sites.
The scientists conducted a controlled burn on all the sites in 1993, and then measured vegetation cover, vegetation density and biomass production in 2005, 2006 and 2007. They found cheatgrass had infested a large portion of the ungrazed sites, leaving these areas even more vulnerable to future fires.
However, cheatgrass did not become problematic on the sites that had been grazed. On these sites, native bunchgrass cover was almost twice as dense as bunchgrass cover on the ungrazed sites. The team concluded that the litter in the ungrazed sites fueled hotter fires that killed off much of the perennial vegetation, which allowed quick-growing invasive annuals to become established.
Results from this study were published in the September 2009 issue of Ecological Applications. This study supports the USDA research priority of responding to global climate change.
ARS is the principal intramural scientific research agency of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
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Drug Eliminates Parasite that Causes Babesiosis in Horses?
Source: Agricultural Research Service
A drug commonly used to treat cattle and sometimes dogs for a blood parasite can, at a relatively high dose, completely eliminate the parasite Babesia caballi from horses, Agricultural Research Service (ARS) scientists have discovered.
B. caballi, a blood parasite transmitted by ticks, is one of the culprits behind the disease babesiosis in horses. Equine babesiosis is also caused by another blood parasite called Babesia (Theileria) equi. The drug imidocarb dipropionate has been used in the United States for many years to treat diseases like Texas fever, also referred to as cattle fever or babesiosis in cattle.
In response to the needs of U.S. veterinarians, research leader Don Knowles and his colleagues at the ARS Animal Disease Research Unit in Pullman, Wash., studied the effectiveness of the drug in horses. They found that a relatively high dose of the drug not only eliminated B. caballi, but also left the horses incapable of transmitting babesiosis.
Though the high dose of the drug is generally well-tolerated by horses, some side effects include stomach upset and diarrhea. Similar collaborative research is being conducted concerning the effectiveness of imidocarb and other potential drugs on B. (Theileria) equi.
The ARS researchers collaborated with scientists at Washington State University in Pullman and with USDA's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS).
In the United States, babesiosis is considered a foreign disease in horses, though it is common in nearby locales including the U.S. territory of Puerto Rico. It is important to assure complete parasite elimination because infected horses can appear healthy, but can still transmit the disease.
Horses presented for import into the United States are tested at the border. Those that test "positive" are either destroyed or returned to their place of origin. However, infected horses occasionally escape detection and enter the United States. Since such horses are often retested for subsequent international movement, they are then discovered to be infected and placed under quarantine at great expense to the state and the owner. Therefore, methods to eliminate the parasite from such horses and eliminate transmission risk were sought.
If approved for use in the United States, imidocarb dipropionate would offer a humane way to clear horses of B. caballi and allow them to enter or remain in the country.
This work was published in the journal Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy.
ARS is the principal intramural scientific research agency of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
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Web-based innovation improves agricultural terrace design
Source: American Society of Agricultural and Biological Engineers
A new internet-based tool for designing agricultural terraces promises to reduce the considerable labor involved and to optimize design by allowing rapid development of alternative layouts.
Writing in the September 2009 issue of Resource: Engineering & Technology for a Sustainable World, Allen L. Thompson, Associate Professor of Biological and Agricultural Engineering at the University of Missouri, introduces a web-based, computer-assisted tool that may reduce the time currently required for the task by as much as half. The new tool is intended to facilitate terrace installation on complex fields, to satisfy conservation goals and make better use of federal and state cost-share dollars. Contractors, landowners, and resource conservation personnel will benefit with the ability to select the most efficient and cost-effective terrace layouts.
Current terrace layout methods are time consuming. Rarely is it practical to develop more than one design that can be compared side-by-side for cost, conservation effectiveness, and farmability. Thompson's program will lessen design time by taking information about boundaries, desired row spacing, equipment requirements, water flow and other considerations and quickly producing several layout options.
Because the system is internet-based, it has the advantage of utilizing uploadable topographic data collected with global positioning systems. "It also provides a centralized database that is regularly updated," Thompson writes, "ensuring easy access to the most current data for soils and topography." Ongoing revisions to the program will permit the use of light detection and ranging (LIDAR) data, with the eventual goal to include calculation of cut and fill volumes and predicted soil loss.
Thompson's program builds on other tools developed in recent decades, taking design capabilities to a greater sophistication. Automated terrace layout has been slow in development, he explains, because of the complexity of the calculations required and the lack of high-precision digital elevation data. "However, LIDAR is becoming more readily available, and web resources have greatly improved in the last few years, both of which have helped generate interest and research support in this area."
Beta testing of the program is currently underway, after which it will be available to the public.
Potential biocontrols found for arundo
PFour promising biological controls that could curb the impact of the invasive plant giant reed in the United States have been found in Spain by Agricultural Research Service (ARS) scientists.
The giant reed, Arundo donax, has been particularly destructive in the Southwest United States, where it’s an exotic and invasive weed of riparian habitats and irrigation canals. But in its native Spain, the giant reed is kept under control by a host of insects, and that’s where the scientists have made numerous trips to in search of biological controls to bring back to the United States.
At the helm of the U.S. project is John Goolsby, an entomologist at the ARS Beneficial Insects Research Unit (BIRU) in Weslaco, Texas. He was accompanied to Spain by scientists Alan Kirk and Walker Jones from the ARS European Biological Control Laboratory in Montpellier, France. The ARS scientific team tested various insects to see if they attack only giant reed and not other plants. Helping out with Goolsby’s efforts at Weslaco is entomologist Patrick Moran, who has documented the traits, or biologies, of the candidate biocontrol agents.
One of the biocontrol candidates, a scale insect called Rhizaspidiotus donacis, attacks the reed’s root. This insect’s release has been recommended by the Technical Advisory Group (TAG), a North American organization that oversees releases of weed biological control agents.
Another of the biocontrol candidates, the Tetramesa romana wasp, was released in Texas in April 2009. This wasp attacks the weed’s main stem, weakening the plant, reducing its overall height, and causing it to form galls and put out side shoots.
The third promising biocontrol agent, the arundo fly (Cryptonevra spp.), eats the inside of new shoots of the plant, while the leaf sheath miner, Lasioptera donacis, destroys the plant’s leaves.
The scale insect--which has an outstanding reproductive capacity and feeds on the part of the root known as the rhizome, where most of the plant biomass occurs--shows the most promise of the four biocontrol candidates. Debilitating the rhizome could have a big impact on the plant’s growth and spread.
This biological control approach is sustainable over the long term and complements mechanical and chemical control strategies. BIRU research leader John Adamczyk notes that the potential release of the scale is a major accomplishment for the research unit.
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Well water should be tested annually to reduce health risks to children
Private well water should be tested yearly, and in some cases more often, according to new guidance offered by the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP). Researchers at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), part of the National Institutes of Health, took a lead role in working with the AAP to develop these recommendations and draft a new AAP policy statement about the things parents should do if their children drink well water. The recommendations call for annual well testing, especially for nitrate and microorganisms such as coliform bacteria, which can indicate that sewage has contaminated the well. The recommendations point out circumstances when additional testing should occur, including testing when there is a new infant in the house or if the well is subjected to structural damage.
"Children are especially vulnerable to waterborne illnesses that may come from contaminated wells," said Walter J. Rogan, M.D., an epidemiologist at NIEHS and lead author on the policy statement and technical report that appears in the June issue of Pediatrics. The new policy statement, "Drinking Water from Private Wells and Risks to Children," offers recommendations for inspection, testing and remediation of wells providing drinking water for children.
"With few exceptions, well owners are responsible for their own wells," said Rogan. Private wells are not subject to federal regulations and are only minimally regulated by states. With proper care, well water is safe; however, wells can become contaminated by chemicals or pathogenic organisms.
Nitrate, which comes from sewage or fertilizer, is the most common contaminant in wells. The presence of nitrates can be a problem particularly for infants under three months who can not metabolize nitrate. Water with a nitrate concentration of more than 1.0 milligrams per liter should not be used to prepare infant formula or given to a child younger than one year. The policy statement suggests using bottled water for infants when nitrate contamination is detected, or when the source of drinking water is not known.
The policy statement and accompanying technical report point out that water contamination is inherently local, and that families with wells need to keep in contact with state and local health experts to determine what should be tested in their community. For example, some parts of the country may have arsenic, radon, salt intrusion or agricultural runoff that may get into the water supply.
"As people move out of urban and suburban areas into areas that are not reached by municipal water supplies, it is more important than ever that people know who to contact in their local health department to get information about local groundwater conditions," said N. Beth Ragan of NIEHS, who served as consultant on these reports. A compilation of state by state telephone and Web-based resources of local experts is included in the technical report. Approximately one-sixth of U.S. households now get their drinking water from private wells.
NIEHS Director Linda Birnbaum, Ph.D., says she is pleased that NIEHS researchers took the lead in writing this statement, and continue their longstanding liaisons with the American Academy of Pediatrics to develop state-of-the-science technical reports that can have a direct impact on public health.
"This statement will be extremely useful to many audiences — especially pediatricians," Birnbaum said. "Pediatricians needed a one-stop shopping document that they can share with parents who have concerns about their children's sources of drinking water."
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Honeybees are on the rise but demand grows faster
The notion that a decline in pollinators may threaten the human food supply – producing a situation that has been referred to as a "pollination crisis" – can be considered a myth, at least where honey bees are concerned, say researchers reporting online on May 7th in Current Biology, a Cell Press publication. First of all, most agricultural crop production does not depend on pollinators. On top of that, while honey bees may be dwindling in some parts of the world, the number of domesticated bees world-wide is actually on the rise, their new report shows.
"The honey bee decline observed in the USA and in other European countries including Great Britain, which has been attributed in part to parasitic mites and more recently to colony collapse disorder, could be misguiding us to think that this is a global phenomenon," said Marcelo Aizen of Universidad Nacional del Comahue in Argentina. "We found here that is not the case."
By analyzing data from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations for temporal trends in the number of commercial bee hives, they found that the global stock of domesticated honey bees has increased by about 45 percent over the last five decades. That increase has primarily been driven by an increased demand for honey from a growing human population, rather than an increased need for pollinators, he added.
But the news isn't all good: The data also show that the demand for crops that rely on insects for pollination has more than tripled over the last half century, suggesting that the global capacity for pollination may still be under considerable stress. These crops include "luxury" agriculture items, now common in any supermarket, like plums, raspberries, and cherries, as well as mangos, guavas, Brazil nuts, and cashew nuts.
"We were particularly astonished when we found that the fraction of agricultural production that depends on pollinators, which includes all of these luxury agriculture items, started growing at a faster pace since the fall of communism in the former USSR and Eastern Europe, and at a much higher rate than the larger fraction of agricultural production that does not depend on pollinators, including wheat and rice, which just follow human population growth," Aizen said. "Although the primary cause of the accelerating increase of pollinator-dependent crops seems to be economic and political – not biological – their rapid expansion has the potential to trigger future pollination problems for both these crops and native species in neighboring areas."
The associated increase in demand for agricultural land could also hasten the destruction of habitat that now supports hundreds or thousands of species of wild pollinators, which would in turn cause a drop in crop yield, he said.
"Most importantly, decreasing yield by these pollinator-dependent crops surely would imply rising market prices, which undoubtedly would constitute a further incentive for their cultivation," Aizen said. "This situation would create a positive feedback circuit that could promote more habitat destruction and further deterioration of pollination services. The good news is that less-intensively managed agro-ecosystems that preserve patches of natural and semi-natural habitats and uncultivated field edges can sustain abundant and diverse communities of wild pollinators."
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Synthetic chemical offers solution for crops facing drought
Crops and other plants are constantly confronted with adverse environmental conditions, lowering yield and costing farmers billions of dollars annually. Plants use specialized signals, called stress hormones, to sense difficult times and adapt to stressful conditions to enhance survival.
Of the various stress hormones, abscisic acid (ABA), produced naturally by plants, has emerged over the last 30 years as the key hormone that helps plants cope with drought conditions. Under such stress, plants increase their ABA levels, which helps them survive the drought through a process not fully understood. So critical is this endogenous chemical to plant survival that researchers have engineered new drought-resistant crops by tinkering with the ABA pathway.
For years, scientists have contemplated spraying ABA directly onto crops to enhance their protection in times of stress. But ABA is a costly, complicated and light-sensitive molecule that has not found use in agriculture.
Now new research from the laboratory of Sean Cutler, an assistant professor of plant cell biology in the Department of Botany and Plant Sciences at the University of California, Riverside, suggests the possibility of spraying stable synthetic chemicals on plants to enhance stress tolerance during times of drought and improve yield.
Using a method called chemical genomics, pioneered by UC Riverside researchers for studying plant biology, Cutler identified pyrabactin, a new synthetic chemical that turns on the ABA signaling pathway in Arabidopsis, a small flowering plant used widely in plant biology laboratories as a model organism.
His lab then used pyrabactin to fish out a receptor for ABA – a highly controversial topic involving retractions of scientific papers as well as the publication of papers of questionable significance. A receptor is a protein molecule in a cell to which mobile signaling molecules may attach. Usually at the top of a signaling pathway, it functions like a boss relaying orders to the team below that then executes particular decisions in the cell.
"Scientists have been trying to solve the ABA receptor problem for more than 20 years, and claims for ABA receptors are not easily received by the scientific community," said Cutler, who came to UCR in 2007 from the University of Toronto. "We screened thousands of chemicals for one that mimics ABA. We found pyrabactin activates some of the ABA receptors in plants and is an excellent mimic of ABA. Moreover, unlike ABA, it is stable and easy to make. It therefore suggests a highly effective chemical strategy for improving plants' ability to survive under low-water conditions, potentially benefiting farmers in drought-prone areas worldwide."
Cutler's approach highlights the power of the chemical genetic approach for uncovering new leads for agrichemistry and, in turn, using those leads to understand a biological process.
"This is a striking example of how a chemical allowed us to solve a problem that genetics has been struggling with," he said. "Clearly, chemical genetics can be used to bypass some of the limitations that slow down classical genetic analysis. Not too long ago, the United Nations called for a 'blue revolution' - the water equivalent of the green revolution - of improved water management and sharing. We have proven that we can enlist chemicals that modulate stress responses in crops as soldiers in the blue revolution. Now our goal is to design the best chemical soldiers possible."
Study results appear April 30 in Science Express and in the May 22 issue of Science magazine.
Because of the prior questionable data in the ABA field, Cutler, the research paper's lead author, took the unusual step of sharing his data with key competitors and turning them into collaborators before publishing the results. Several labs working in the ABA signaling field tested the ABA receptor that Cutler's group identified, and validated his results. Scientists from these labs are co-authors of the research paper.
"Several high-profile papers have tried to claim discovery of ABA receptors but their research could not stand the test of time, and these papers were ultimately withdrawn," said Natasha Raikhel, the director of UCR's Center for Plant Cell Biology, of which Cutler is a member. "I believe this time, Dr. Cutler and his team have isolated a true ABA receptor."
Next in the research, Cutler and collaborator Brian Volkman of the Medical College of Wisconsin will work on deducing the structure of receptor-bound ABA and use this information to guide the design of new chemicals that turn on the ABA signaling pathway. Cutler and collaborators also plan to further understand how the ABA receptors affect plant physiology.
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