Public Affairs

                                                                                                                                                                                          Southern Illinois University

Carbondale, IL 62901-6915·618.453.2276

Sue Davis, Director

siucnews@siu.edu

Headline

SIUC Country Column

By K.C. Jaehnig

            What do Chicago inner-city high school students, soybean genes and an Illinois farmer’s bottom line have in common?  A $10,000 National Science Foundation grant that will team researchers from Southern Illinois University Carbondale with budding scientists  in a search for the key to drought resistance in the state’s most important crop.

            My Abdelmajid Kassem, a high school biology teacher at Chicago’s Percy L. Julian High School, is the connecting link.  Kassem arrived at the SIUC campus June 24 to learn how to look for and collect information about genes that can help a soybean plant withstand exposure to manganese.  In August, he will take this new knowledge back to Julian and teach it to 21 handpicked senior high students.  They in turn will funnel their findings back to SIUC and …

            “Bingo!  A ‘Eureka!’ moment — or at least that’s what we hope,” said SIUC biotechnologist David A. Lightfoot, the man behind the plan.

            “It’s a win-win situation for everyone.  We get a lot of data on the plants and how they respond to manganese to help us find precisely where the (resistance) genes are, the students learn skills that can help set them apart from the crowd when applying to university, and the National Science Foundation achieves its goal of promoting professional development in public school teachers.”

 Lightfoot, whose research centers on building a better soybean, has long focused on diseases.  Having developed a means for finding genes quickly and easily, he’s now turning his attention to drought.

            “Soybean sudden death syndrome causes crop losses of about 1 percent per year, soybean cyst nematodes takes another 5 percent, but water deficits account for about 50 percent,” Lightfoot said.

            “Manganese ties into drought tolerance because when it’s present at high levels, it inhibits root growth.  It’s found in all soils, but in soils that are a little acidic, it ceases to be a solid and mixes with water so plants take it up more easily.  And where are the soils too acid?   Basically, the whole southern U.S.”

  For Lightfoot, the National Science Foundation’s decision to create its new Research Experience for Teachers grant program came at just the right time.  He needs a lot of data to pinpoint the location of manganese resistance, and he already had a working relationship with Kassem, who is, in his spare time, an SIUC doctoral student in plant biology.

            “We knew we could adapt what he was doing in a way that would also help his career,” Lightfoot said.  “Our college has an agricultural resources curriculum (which offers lesson plans and teaching kits to public school teachers), and we knew Dexter (Wakefield, one of two new assistant professors overseeing that program) could adapt an existing kit on soybean hydroponics for this project.  Dexter could assist with teaching techniques and collate data, too. Everything just seemed to fit.”

            It’s such a good fit that in the next several years Lightfoot hopes to expand the number of teacher and student partners in his research program.

            “We have to start small, but based on our experience from this year, we are hoping to have 20 teachers — more if they’re interested — in a workshop setting where we can teach them all at one time,” he said.

            “That produces a multiplication effect:  if one teacher teaches six classes of 25 students, that’s 150 students each year, times 20 — it’s thousands of students!

            “We’d love to have several high schools every year doing these studies.  That would give us a very high-quality data set that would help us know exactly where to look.”

            As for the students, Lightfoot believes their participation in the program could provide the spark that would ultimately lead to careers in biotechnology.

            “There are 2.4 million jobs right now, and it’s an industry that has been growing by 10 percent a year,” Lightfoot said.  And average salaries are “fabulous,” he said.  “A mid-career biotechnologist could receive $150,000 and stock options.  If they pick the company carefully and it has some good products, they could do even better.”

            But even those students who do not become scientists could profit from the lessons that genetics provides.

            “In the experiments, they will be dealing with a series of families, of generations,” Lightfoot said.  “Perhaps Grandma resists manganese really well, but Grandpa just curls up and dies.  They’ll see that from the same family, you can have a wide range of response to the same environmental cues.

            “That’s true even with the clones — plants that are like identical twins.  It shows that genetics isn’t everything.  There’s enough variation in how identical twins do in the same environment that you can see genetics don’t completely determine how you perform.

“Environment matters — the same individual can do very well or very badly in different environments, and that’s a life lesson.  Pick your environment carefully, and you will grow.  Be careless, and you will not thrive.”

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