 This time on Partners, it's the National Research Initiative. From unlocking the secrets of wheat at the University of California Davis, to exploring the medicinal wonders of the Mayapple in Mississippi, and fighting obesity among Hawaiian Islanders, American researchers are striving for answers to critical scientific issues in U.S. agriculture. This is really the leveraging of our nation's investment in basic science across the Federal Science Enterprise. Welcome to Partners! In the next half hour, we'll travel the nation and see breakthrough work in research, education and extension. That's what CSR EES is all about, helping universities generate valuable knowledge for those who need it and educating our next generation of Americans. And now, it's time for Partners. America today faces challenges unimaginable to our founders just a few hundred years ago. Since that time, our numbers have grown to nearly 300 million. Each year, over 3.3 million people are added to the U.S. population. With that growth, we are losing valuable space. One acre of natural habitat or farmland is converted into new buildings or highways for each new American. And there are other issues. As globalization and international trade increase, we have introduced over 50,000 invasive species to our homeland. These plants and animals are causing more than $137 billion worth of damage to U.S. crops and natural resources yearly. And Americans are using more energy. General consumption increased by 24 percent from 1970 to 1990 and continues to grow. Water resources, especially in the West, are being depleted. On average, underground aquifers are drained 25 percent faster than they are being replenished nationwide. In 1991, Congress created the National Research Initiative, or the NRI, within the Cooperative State Research, Education and Extension Service of USDA. The NRI is the nation's primary merit-based, peer-reviewed grants program that addresses key issues in food, fiber and natural resources. The goal here was to fund research that would keep U.S. agricultural competitive, produce safe and high quality products for consumers, and thirdly, do this in such a way that we would sustain our natural resource base that all of us count on to produce food and provide a place for us to live. The globalization of agricultural markets brings in new challenges for U.S. agriculture. The key will be to always have a better product and always stay ahead of changes in environment and other factors. Never before have we been able to make the kind of investment we're now making across the full scope involved in agricultural research. This is a new frontier. This is really the synergism or the leveraging of our nation's investment in basic science across the federal science enterprise to something that's really relevant for agriculture and relevant to everyone. Bees visit flowers, and in so doing, they gather the material to make honey. But in those visits to flowers, they're doing something very important for the plants. They're pollinating and thereby contributing to increased productivity for many of our important agricultural crops. Gene Robinson is a professor of entomology at the University of Illinois. Bees have fascinated him for over 30 years. In addition to learning about the intricacies of this vital pollinator, he understands their economic importance. Their value nationally on an annual basis is estimated to be over $20 billion in terms of added value to the crops. But new events are threatening the European honey bee, the species upon which American agriculture is so dependent. In the past few decades, Africanized honey bees have invaded North America. Their aggressive behavior has caused problems for producers, as they are difficult to manage. And then there is AFB, American fowl brood, strong bacteria that attack the larvae or baby bees. Large infestations can lead to the death of entire honey bee colonies. We have fewer than half the colonies of honey bees in America than we had as little as 10, 15 years ago, and yet a much bigger population, much greater needs for food production. So that's not a good situation. In response to these threats, CSREES awarded Gene Robinson several National Research Initiative grants. Hey, Mark. Hi, Gene. How's the printing going? Going really well. NRI funds have allowed him to use state-of-the-art equipment to study honey bees at the genomic level. In partnership with the USDA B-Lab, Gene is taking on the AFB problem. What our joint research involves is using the new microarray that we are building to look at how the bacteria is affecting the bee, when it's killing the bee, what genes are involved in that process, and, more importantly, what kind of immune responses can the bee mount in response to being attacked by this pathogen. The grant has also allowed Gene and his team to address the Africanized bee problem by building a new microarray, a device that can measure thousands of genes simultaneously. That's what the NRI grant was for, was to build a new array. This array is allowing us to address a variety of challenges related to honey bees, and one of them, of course, is the Africanized bee. So we're interested in exploring differences in gene expression in the brains of Africanized bees versus European bees to see if we can't get some hints as to what might be the basis for their differences in defensive behavior. The honey bee genome has opened up many vistas of research. One such vista is learning how bees respond to emergencies. Engineers at the University of Illinois are working with Gene on this project, a timely subject in light of the Hurricane Katrina disaster. Honey bees have sophisticated communication systems, ritualized movements called a bee dance. Studying how they communicate may help humans in their own social organization. It's a real challenge to understand how a tiny organism with a brain no bigger than a grass seed is able to engage in symbolic communication when we otherwise see it limited to just a few very big-brained animals. The bee is the only non-mammal in the animal kingdom to have a complex and some, say, symbolic communication system. And this dance encodes several important pieces of information. First, very simply, it says, hey, there's food out there. You should pay attention. But more importantly than that, it gives both distance and direction information. So it tells other bees who've never visited those sites before where to fly out in the environment to obtain the food. So what this does then is allow a colony to search broadly for different food sources but to very quickly concentrate on the most productive, the most high quality food sources. We really need to do everything we can to bring back honey bees to the position of strength they were and even to go beyond that to create a really healthy bee industry. I really see them as overachievers and it's fascinating to try to understand what are the mechanisms that contribute to their success. From 1991 through 2004, the NRI received more than $1.5 billion in congressional appropriations and awarded over 9,500 grants. On June 10th of 2004, I was diagnosed with diabetes. Since that time, Christine McClurrin, on the advice of her doctor, has joined the Lifestyle Enhancement Program at the YNI Coast Comprehensive Health Center on Oahu. When she started, Christine weighed 250 pounds. To date, she has already dropped 40 and has plans to get her weight down to 175. Oh, I feel so good. Like, wow, like when weight, when heavy weight got off of my back. Like I was carrying two people. To me, it's a lifesaver because like when I diagnosed with diabetes, now it's like, it's my life. It's either I exercise or I die. You know, that's the harsh reality of diabetes. Get a lot of people that need help, that need helping their weight management and diabetes, especially on the YNI Coast, a lot of obesity and diabetes. We basically are trying to improve the health and reduce the horrible impact of obesity on our community. And if we look at different kinds of statistics related to health, you'll see that Hawaiians have some of the worst health statistics, you know, in the nation. So we have some of the highest prevalence of obesity, of asthma, of heart disease, of diabetes, and arthritis, hypertension, you know, all of these kinds of conditions. In response to these health problems, CSREES awarded the Health Center a four-year, $800,000 NRI grant to study obesity in the community. Data collected from various subgroups of the population help explain the intricacies of this health crisis. But the staff's efforts go way beyond the clinic and the weight room. What we're trying to do is increase healthy agricultural production in the community. And as a sort of secondary benefit, we want to increase socioeconomic viability in the community, because this happens to be the poorest community on Island. One of the things that we have done is we've been able to network with community farmers and network with fishermen to actually grow more healthy vegetables and to actually have their food available here in the community. One such source of fresh local food comes from Waianae High School. Students here produce various types of seaweed, a nutritious plant used by Hawaiian residents for centuries. Today they are harvesting OGO, a popular mineral-rich seaweed. The students send their produce to the Health Center's Pavilion restaurant, which is open to the public. Another supplier is local farmer, Gigi Kokuyo. His farm produces a cornucopia of fresh food. We have all different kinds of stuff, from corn and beans, lettuce, radishes, green onions, peanuts, taro, and different kinds of fruits, bananas, papayas, mangoes, yeah. The land where we are now is really very fertile. We started to produce things that we can sell to the restaurant, and this is great because we are not pressured, and every week we deliver some stuff, and that's a good thing for us because it's a way to survive. They touch thousands of people, and through them people start to realize that there is a different way of living. And this is our work, it's like when you plant a tree, it doesn't grow up in one day. It will take 10 years, 20 years, it doesn't matter. But we have to plant something, anything that is happening. The Health Center's restaurant is increasing healthy food awareness among residents. And there are plans to establish a local farmer's market in the near future. For Christine McLaurin, she couldn't be happier that new markets are being created for local fishermen and farmers. Well, that means more healthy food for me. It's local, and I can buy it at our grocery stores too, or I can go up to the Comprehensive Pavilion and have something healthy to eat. It's a straight diet and exercise, and it works 40 pounds later. It takes a lot of work, it's not going to come easy. You don't lose weight overnight. It's determination, it's dedication, and you really got to want it bad enough. And for me, that's my life, and nothing and no one is going to stop me. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 65% of American adults are overweight or obese. The cost of obesity was estimated to be $117 billion in 2000. It's a beautiful plant that you can grow everywhere. It has moved with people from the beginning of civilization and it's linked to that origin of that civilization. And wheat has this fantastic plasticity, capacity of growing one place or change some of its characteristics and grow in a completely different environment. And that's something that has fascinated me all the time. Jorge Dubkovsky's fascination with wheat has led him down several paths of discovery that are funded by the National Research Initiative. Wheat is not just a wild plant, it's a plant that we cultivate. It's a plant that we need to make better. We are increasing our population to very large numbers and up to the same space of land, we need to feed all that people. So we need to engineer wheat to be a better plant. The only way that you can engineer something is if you understand. To advance that understanding, Jorge and his team at the University of California Davis are mapping the wheat genome. A genome is all the genetic material of a living organism. It is the entire set of hereditary instructions for building and running an organism and passing life on to the next generation. Sequencing of the human genome, a 13-year effort was finally completed in 2003. It is considered by many to be the greatest accomplishment of modern science. The wheat genome that Jorge Dubkovsky is studying, however, is five times as complex. So it's the first time we have the capacity to study all the genes working together and talking to each other to produce what we see. So genomics will give us the possibility to understand how each of the genes works, how they talk to each other and how they make one of the functions work. If we understand that better, there's a much bigger chance that we can engineer that more efficiently than if we just randomly mix pieces and hope for the best. One of Jorge's developments to date has been his work with DNA tags that can be used in a process known as marker-assisted selection. This allows scientists to more easily select genes with desirable traits, especially those highly affected by the environment. So marker-assisted selection is to use the information from the DNA, that difference in DNA to select directly for the gene that is producing the result that you want to select. Here we are doing something completely different. We are just using the genes that are already present in wheat. We are making crosses, as we have been done all our life as breeders. The only thing that we are doing is using a better tool to see what we are selecting. So we are not introducing a foreign piece of DNA anywhere. We are just crossing something that is already in the germ plants of wheat and then using those markers to put the pieces together in the way that we want to assemble that plant. What these genetic markers do is give you a way to go out and test each plant and say which ones have the combination that I am looking for. This is something that through breeding trials and exposures to harsh conditions or diseases might take you an entire career and you can leapfrog through all of that and get the result you want quickly with this marker-assisted selection. And the final product isn't modified beyond what's traditionally been done for plant breeding for thousands of years. I like to see a wheat that is completely free of stripe rust. Here at the annual field day held at the UC Davis Experimental Plots wheat farmers from around the state gather to hear about recent developments. One problem of high concern is a fungus called stripe rust. It ruined $400 million of wheat in 2003. In response to this Jorge is using marker-assisted selection to make new wheat types that are resistant to stripe rust. This allows him to see results of his experimentation quickly as compared to traditional breeding methods. There are certain things that we need to have happen now and we have certain diseases and certain qualities that we need addressed. So what we find so good about Jorge is the fact that we really have faith in him that we're going to get some of our immediate needs dealt with. He's basically a scientist 24-7. The U.S. is not the center of the universe on wheat. We used to be one of the few export players now we're one of many and in order to maintain our competitive edge we're going to have to be more aggressive on addressing some of the immediate needs and that's where Jorge is going to help tremendously. The development of these particular tools marker-assisted selection understanding the gene-rich regions within the genome have really come together and with the partnership of those in the traditional breeding community we can now bring these new technologies to bear to achieve the kind of results that we really need to keep U.S. agriculture competitive, solve problems and produce better quality products for consumers. Another effort that may go unnoticed by the American public is UC Davis' work with vernalization. The ability of wheat to determine when to flower based on temperature by identifying and experimenting with two genes, VRN1 and 2 it has been possible to manipulate flowering time. This research has practical implications for improving wheat varieties. Now that we know which are the genes we can see what are the different gene variants that you have in the different cultivars in the different regions and test which of these variants is the best for each region. We couldn't see that before but we didn't know which is the gene. I think that is the point where this discovery will help. It's a great time to be applying geneticists. I think that this has been the decade of biology. It's an amazing explosion. It's really doing part of that adventure. Mayapple grows in colonies. In the spring is one of the first one that comes. That to me is very appealing. Rita Morris is on the hunt. Her job today is to collect Mayapple. This hardy plant, native to the eastern United States ranges from the dry Texas plains to the wet Minnesota woodlands. Rita's focus is the Mayapple's unique chemical compound called Potofilatoxin. Potofilatoxin is used in anti-cancer drugs in pharmaceuticals for arthritis and also a topic used to control skin problems. It is Mayapple's strong medicinal qualities that have taken Rita to eight states to survey the plant's populations. The collecting is an arduous process. From within this circle, Rita takes a soil sample, photographs the site and finally gathers leaf collections. Each sample is diligently numbered. So too is the soil from the collection area. Rita also digs out a Mayapple plant with its roots intact. It will be transplanted later and become part of the greenhouse collection. With the sampling complete, Rita now heads out of the dense woodlands and back to her lab. The University of Mississippi is looking into the National Center for Natural Products Research. It is here where the analysis of the plant's chemical compounds begins. The American Mayapple has a lot in the leaves and the leaves are renewable organs and so we can have a sustainable crop. So once you have that your field established after the fourth year most like you can start cutting the leaves every year. This research could not have started at a more opportune time. Potophyllatoxin, Mayapple's valuable commercial compound is the precursor of semi-synthetic drugs for those fighting leukemia and lung and testicular cancer. It was the Mayapple from India's Himalayan Mountains that traditionally supplied the potophyllatoxin needed by the pharmaceutical industry. Specifically, a revised chemical compound was collected from its roots. During harvest in India plants were simply pulled out, roots and all. The constant demand for the compound led to the demise of the Indian Mayapple. Now listed as an endangered species it is rarely found in nature. Various laboratories have tried to synthesize Potophyllatoxin to fill the gap. However, total synthesis is expensive and the yield too low. In the U.S. the plant we have here, Rita and her team have identified ways to get the same amount of extract from the leaves and so you don't have to destroy the plant in order to get the important pharmaceutical. She pulled in the right team. We have agronomist, agriculture engineers, pharmaceutical engineers working together as well as our extension service people. One team member developed a method to quantify Potophyllatoxin found in the samples. Another from USDA helped Rita discover a more efficient way to extract the compound. Others are mapping wild Mayapple colonies found during collection. For her second NRI grant Rita proposed collaborating with Mississippi State University to explore the possibilities of developing Mayapple into a profitable row crop. Now MSU researchers are developing the Mayapple through rigorous field trials at the experiment station in Verona, Mississippi. Optimum harvest time and ideal propagation schedules are being determined. So is the amount of sun needed for maximum Potophyllatoxin production. For example, we grew Mayapple in different levels of shade and what we found out was that Mayapple under full sun has more Potophyllatoxin. The potential for Mayapple to become a domestic crop holds great promise. It would offer the pharmaceutical industry a potent, economical source of Potophyllatoxin much to the benefit of those dependent on anti-cancer drugs. And the plant could be an ideal niche crop for the American farmer. In the meantime, the University of Mississippi team analyzes extracts provided by the Mississippi State Field Experiments. As Rita continues her work there, she also sees potential for discovery beyond the Mayapple. Mayapple has become my model for medicinal plant domestication. But of course it can be translated to other species that we want to domesticate as well. From cracking the genetic code of honey bees, agriculture's valuable pollinators to fighting obesity through healthy food and exercise from unlocking the secrets of complex wheat genomes to transforming a wild medicinal plant into a productive row crop. The National Research Initiative is meeting the challenges of the 21st century. And CSREES continues their support for partners who are providing solutions for agriculture, human health, the environment and communities throughout America. On the next edition, partners travels to the Great Plains and discovers groundbreaking biasing research that promises to deliver selenium rich meat. Community gardens that are reconnecting residents to traditional plants. A juneberry project that is re-establishing this time-honored tribal favorite. And a prairie outreach program that mixes local youth and horses. That's Tribal Natural Resources next time on Partners. National Research Initiative and other Partners episodes log on to this website.