Project Number: 6250-21520-042-04
Project Type: Trust

Start Date: Jan 01, 2004
End Date: Dec 31, 2008

Objective:
The overall focus of the project is to use modern breeding approaches to improve iron, zinc, and provitamin A content in six staple food crops important to the developing world (maize, wheat, rice, bean, cassava, and sweet potato). Once improved lines are developed, nutritional efficacy studies and socio-economic assessments in target populations in developing countries also will be conducted.

Approach:
The Children's Nutrition Research Center will focus on the genomics of iron and zinc nutrition in model and agronomic plants, in order to identify genes and gene loci of relevance to metal transport and partitioning in edible plant tissues. Work also will be conducted to translate this knowledge into useful molecular tools that can be used in marker-assisted selection procedures by collaborating plant breeders to enhance iron and zinc content in the target crops. The goals of this project are to generate new cultivars of staple food crops with enhanced levels of iron, zinc, and/or provitamin A carotenoids. The Grusak lab will conduct physiological and molecular investigations with bean, rice, Medicago truncatula, and Arabidopsis thaliana to identify novel genes involved in plant iron and zinc nutrition.