RESEARCHER: FINE TUNING BIOTECHNOLOGY LIKE LISTENING TO ORCHESTRA

COLLEGE STATION – Progress in the field of genomics was music to the ears of researchers and students who attended “The Changing Face of Agriculture” lecture Thursday, which marked the Texas A&M University College of Agriculture and Life Sciences 125th anniversary.

Dr. Ronald Phillips, University of Minnesota Regents Professor and McKnight Presidential Chair in Genomics, spoke on “Letting the Orchestra Play through Genomics and Biotechnology.”

The difference between genetics and genomics, he explained, is like the difference in one viola (a gene) or an entire orchestra (a genome).

“Genomics is how all the genes interact,” he said, noting that researchers worldwide are collaborating to complete genetic codes of various organisms, to learn the function of every gene, to see how genes are expressed across an entire genome and to figure out how genes network. Some of this work is rapidly being completed, while other areas will take decades, he said.

That’s because some organisms are much more complex than others.

“The human genome is about the same size as that of corn,” Phillips noted, “and they are about five times larger than the genome of rice. The wheat genome is more than 37 times larger than the rice genome.” Much of the early work on genomics has been done on Arabidopsis, a common weed, because it’s genome is only one-third that of rice. What has been learned from it, therefore, can be applied towards the knowledge of the larger genomes.

“The challenge is to determine the function of each gene,” he said. “Corn has 50,000 genes, humans have perhaps 42,000 genes and yeast has 6,000 genes.”

He said progress has been made via the use of DNA chips which enable researchers to find where a gene is expressed in a genome. That would be similar to being able to determine where a viola is playing in an orchestra and then realizing that the violas often are seated in similar areas of most orchestras.

Work in biotechnology will continue to be important, he said, to feed the world’s rapidly increasing population. While it took more than 120 years for the human population to increase from 1 billion to 2 billion from 1804-1927, it took only 12 years for the 1 billion increase from 1987 to 1999 from 5 billion to 6 billion.

About half of the increases in food production come from natural resources management and half have come from genetic improvements, he said.

“I would think that genetics will play an even more important role in the future to meet food needs as we have less land and the desire to use fewer chemicals growing crops,” he said.

The lecture concluded a year-long series reflecting on the history and pondering the future of agriculture at Texas A&M, which was founded in 1876 as the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Texas. In 1884 the department of agriculture was opened at the college, and in 1911 E.J. Kyle was appointed dean of the school of agriculture. In 1989, that school was redesignated the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences.

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