Project Number: 1907-21000-024-07
Project Type: Trust

Start Date: Dec 15, 2006
End Date: Jun 30, 2010

Objective:
This is a renewal of a collaborative grant between the Kochian lab and researchers from Brazil (EMBRAPA), Kenya, Africa (Moi University), and Purdue University to study plant and soil factors that would help improve agricultural production of maize and sorghum on acid soils in Africa. Dr. Kochian will be conducting research on physiological and molecular mechanisms of aluminum tolerance and phosphorus efficiency in maize and sorghum.

Approach:
In sorghum, we are taking a map-based cloning approach to isolate the major aluminum tolerance gene. In maize, we have identified major Al toloerance QTLs and will be using expression profiling as well as T-DNA insertion technology to try to identify candidate Al tolerance genes.