Seminars

We are developing field pennycress into a new oilseed and winter cover crop. Given that the majority of farmlands in the Midwestern United States lack a living cover during the fall and winter months, which leaves soil vulnerable to erosion and nutrient runoff, a winter cover would provide important ecosystem services. Field pennycress is winter hardy and can be planted in the fall following the harvest of main crops like corn or soybeans. In the spring, pennycress can be harvested in time for planting the next main crop. Integrating pennycress into the current agricultural systems will provide a beneficial winter cover and new source of biofuel without displacing land for food production. There has been limited breeding to improve important agronomic traits in pennycress like decreasing seed dormancy and increasing spring maturity rates. However, pennycress is closely related to Arabidopsis, and the translation of basic knowledge from Arabidopsis should stimulate rapid improvements in pennycress. To this end, we are utilizing the power of next-generation sequencing (NGS) to develop the initial genomic resources to jumpstart a modern genomics-based breeding program. While short read NGS datasets have traditionally been computationally difficult to assemble, we have configured and built a personal computer for ~$2000 US able to perform de novo assembly of the pennycress transcriptome and genome. We will present a detailed analysis of the annotated draft transcriptome, identification of key regulatory genes for important agronomic traits, and will provide an update on the status of the draft genome assembly and annotation.

Reference: Dorn et al. Plant J. (2013) 75, 1028–1038