Advances

(Advances gives a glimpse of the many significant research projects at the university. Tell us about your discoveries by e-mailing: wisweek@news.wisc.edu.)

Agriculture receives $6.6 million in grants
Applied agricultural research at UW–Madison will receive $6.6 million in U.S. Department of Agriculture grants over four years, pending final congressional and presidential approval.

“We are pleased that Wisconsin projects make up 9 percent of the 86 projects funded and will receive nearly 6 percent of the total funding awarded,” says Elton Aberle, dean of the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences.

Only five states – California, Florida, Texas, Indiana and Wisconsin – will administer grants of more than $5 million each.

The grants, part of the Initiative for Future Agriculture and Food Systems, will fund eight Wisconsin projects ranging from diseases affecting the dairy industry to biotechnology to plant genetics.

To control Johne’s Disease, scientists seek farm help
A research team from UW–Madison is enlisting the help of hundreds of U.S. dairy producers in an effort to prevent Johne’s disease, which may be the most serious infectious disease now threatening the U.S. dairy industry.

The results should help the industry rate sires based on the resistance of the sires’ daughters to the disease. The researchers want eventually to identify the genes responsible for susceptibility and resistance to Johne’s.

“Studies indicate that about 10 percent of U.S. dairy cattle – and between 20 percent and 40 percent of herds – have Johne’s disease,” says team leader George Shook, a dairy cattle geneticist. “Johne’s costs producers about $200 million a year, which averages out to $22 per cow per year for each cow in the United States.”

Brian Kirkpatrick, a cattle geneticist at the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences, and Michael Collins, a veterinary microbiologist in the School of Veterinary Medicine, are also working on the study.

“Johne’s is a slowly developing, incurable disease caused by a chronic intestinal infection,” says Collins. The infection interferes with an animal’s ability to absorb nutrients from food.

Researchers clone a key plant gene
An advance in plant genetics helps explain why biennial crops, flowers and weeds don’t bloom their first summer and only flower and set seed after a prolonged period of near-freezing temperatures.

Researchers have cloned FRIGIDA, one of two genes that makes Arabidopsis a biennial, the Oct. 13 issue the journal Science reports. A small, weedy member of the mustard family, Arabidopsis is the model organism for studying plant genetics.

The research team included Richard Amasino and Scott Michaels of UW–Madison’s Department of Biochemistry and researchers at the John Innes Centre in Norwich, England.

“The biennial nature of crops such as wheat, cabbage and sugar beet is critical to their value,” says Amasino, a plant molecular biologist. “The biennial nature of winter wheat enables planting in fall and rapid growth in spring. The same trait in cabbage or sugar beet ensures that only roots and leaves are produced during the first growing season.”

The discovery may help plant breeders block flowering so plants produce more vegetative parts, Amasino says. Inhibiting flowering in alfalfa, for example, might lead to varieties with greater yields.