Media Contact: Jennifer Martin, (202) 720-8188

WASHINGTON, July 23, 2010 – Researchers from Virginia Tech have identified the mechanism several important microbial pathogens use to infect plants and cause devastating diseases. The study, published in the July 23, 2010, issue of Cell, also provides insights into how some microbes cause diseases in humans and animals.

The identified mechanism is used by fungi and oomycetes (microbes related to algae), including the kind of fungi that are causing wheat rust epidemics in Africa and Asia, and by oomycete pathogens that caused the Irish potato famine of the 19th century and continue to cause crop losses for producers today.

“Our findings suggest broad, new strategies for combating the most damaging diseases of the world’s major crop foods, including wheat, rice, maize and potatoes, as well as several nasty human diseases,” said Brett Tyler of Virginia Tech’s Virginia Bioinformatics Institute and leader of the study.

The study, which was funded by USDA’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) and the National Science Foundation, shows that once a fungus or an oomycete comes into contact with a host, it may initiate an infection by secreting special proteins, called effectors, that have the ability to enter and reprogram the host’s cells. Each of these effectors consists of a long chain of amino acids designed to disable a host cell’s immune system. But a small stretch of the amino acid chain, which contains four particular amino acids, binds to a specific type of lipid; this lipid is a fat-like molecule that is part of the membrane surrounding the host cell.

When the identified four amino acids in the effector’s protein chain binds to the lipid on the host cell’s membrane, it acts like a key that opens a locked door, unlocking the membrane to the invading effector. Once unlocked, the cell extends itself to engulf and absorb the effector.

Previously, scientists were only aware of how effectors of bacteria were able to enter plant cells, which they did through a needle-like structure produced by the bacteria that punctured the host cell’s membrane . The Tyler Team made two surprising discoveries: 1) the existence of the binding lipid (called PI3P) on host cell surfaces and 2) the ability of the microbial effectors to use the binding lipid to invade host cells. Also surprising were:

• The novelty and simplicity of the mechanism used by fungi and oomycetes to insert their effectors into host cells.
• The discovery that fungi and oomycetes use the same binding mechanism to introduce effectors into plant cells, even though these two classes of microbes are evolutionarily distinct from one another.
• The presence of an abundance of the binding lipids on the surfaces of plant cells as well as animal cells, including some human cells. This discovery suggests that fungal and oomycete effectors might also enter animal and human cells through the same newly-discovered method they use in plants. Thus this phenomenon may, in fact, be an attack mechanism common to fungal and oomycete diseases of plants, animals and humans.

This research demonstrated the possibility that fungal and oomycete effectors could be blocked from entering the host cells by preventing them from attaching to binding lipids. Further research will be needed to exploit this information to develop therapies for fighting diseases caused by fungi and oomycetes.

Through federal funding and leadership for research, education and extension programs, NIFA focuses on investing in science and solving critical issues impacting people's daily lives and the nation’s future. For more information, visit www.nifa.usda.gov.

USDA is an equal opportunity provider, employer, and lender. To file a complaint of discrimination, write: USDA, Director, Office of Civil Rights, 1400 Independence Ave., S.W., Washington, D.C. 20250-9410 or call (800) 795-3272(voice), or (202) 720-6382 (TDD).

Media Contact: Jennifer Martin, (202) 720-8188

By Jill Lee
July 15, 2010

Jim Hafer’s passion for teaching is second only to his savvy in leveraging opportunity.  Hafer, an agriculture instructor at Chief Dull Knife College in Lame Deer, Mont., noticed a gathering storm of local retirements forming at both Pacific Power and Light’s cogeneration plants and at Western Energy’s coal mines. He made a decision. His students could—and would—fill the coming talent gap caused by the retirement of the Baby Boomer generation.

Hafer, with funding from USDA’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) and the help of a colleague at Montana State University (MSU), would train them.

“Our college serves 275 students from the Northern Cheyenne Reservation as well as students from adjacent, non-reservation communities,” Hafer said. “The Cheyenne average salary is $12,000–$15,000 annually. The starting salary for a welder is $45,000, with experienced welders earning $65,000. My students won’t stand a chance, however, unless they can prove they can do the job, and do it safely. If we can help them do that, then the local unions will give them an opportunity to complete their job training.”

Students agree. Al Holdstheenemy, 47, a janitor at a local high school has excelled in the program.

“The course has me thinking about small projects I can do, maybe even another career field,” he said. “There a lot of stuff that I never knew was out there until I took the welding class.”

Holdstheenemy says he plans to take more courses in the future and gain even more welding expertise.

Younger students are also attending this class. Tyrone Woodenlegs, 28, works for the tribal natural resource department.  

“I was interested in the welding class because I feel that it is a skill that I could definitely use.  Whether it be for a hobby or even a career. And so far I have enjoyed the class,” he said.  I feel that I am getting the best instruction, and I feel very comfortable and safe with the class environment.”

To create this program, Hafer combined funding from NIFA with a USDA Rural Development Grant, to finance a 3,000-square-foot targeted vocational facility, classroom renovations, and support facilities. The NIFA Tribal Colleges Education Equity Grants Program helped to pay salaries and develop a curriculum for Hafer’s welding students.

“NIFA’s program helped our college leverage its first-time USDA Rural Development brick-and-mortar monies,” Hafer said. “The Equity grant gave me the first step on a ladder of credibility and confidence that let me take the next step to complete this project.”

The Equity program promotes and strengthens higher education instruction in the food and agricultural sciences and other educational opportunities at the 32 tribal colleges that are designated as 1994 land-grant institutions. Project directors at these schools can use the funding to design curricula, enhance their own skills, promote student learning through real life experiences, provide instructional equipment, recruit and retain students, and collaborate with professors at larger schools.

As director of the school’s agricultural program, Hafer teaches a host of classes to help students successfully manage tribal lands. Animal husbandry, range management and soil science are all part of the curriculum.  When he offered the welding class in the fall of 2009 it filled up in days—the school had to open up another section to accommodate student interest. 

That’s when Hafer brought on Kirk Denny, an MSU extension agent and an experienced welder, to help him teach. Denny is an agent with the Federally Recognized Tribes Extension Program, a NIFA grant program that funds the work of 1890 and 1862 land-grant institutions as they assist tribal communities on a host of issues, including the competitiveness and sustainability of rural and farm economies.

Denny is not only a good instructor—he’s also a role model for his students.

“I learned how to weld in high school,” Denny said. “I worked as a welder during my last three years of college.  Welding not only paid for my education, it’s what kept me in school. It wasn’t about having honors classes, it was about having a skill that I could always fall back on.”

Hafer is counting on USDA’s grants programs to help provide that skill—and opportunity—to both fill the void of retiring skilled workers and improve his students’ quality of life.

Through federal funding and leadership for research, education and extension programs, NIFA focuses on investing in science and solving critical issues impacting people's daily lives and the nation's future. For more information, visit www.nifa.usda.gov.

USDA is an equal opportunity provider, employer, and lender. To file a complaint of discrimination, write: USDA, Director, Office of Civil Rights, 1400 Independence Ave., S.W., Washington, D.C. 20250-9410 or call (800) 795-3272(voice), or (202) 720-6382 (TDD).

Media Contact: Jennifer Martin, (202) 720-8188

WASHINGTON, July 15, 2010 – USDA's National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) awarded today eight grants through the Children, Youth and Families at Risk (CYFAR) Sustainable Communities Project (SCP) to strengthen outreach program aimed at giving at-risk children, youth and families the skills and knowledge they need to lead healthy and successful lives.

"Many American children are at risk for problems, such as infant mortality, poor health, abuse, crime, teen pregnancy and poor performance in school," said Roger Beachy, NIFA director. "CYFAR promotes positive youth and family development by supporting healthy environments and providing opportunities for learning and leadership by youth and adults in their communities."

For example, in Connecticut an urban gardening project will teach teens from low-income families the leadership and entrepreneurial skills that will help them as they grow into adults.

This year NIFA awarded $4,620,000 to eight land-grant universities. Since 1991, CYFAR has supported programs in more than 600 communities in all states and territories. The purpose of SCP funding is to improve the quality and quantity of comprehensive community-based programs for at-risk children, youth, and families supported by the Cooperative Extension System. Collaboration across disciplines, program areas and geographic lines, as well as a holistic approach that views the individual in the context of the family and community, are central to Sustainable Community Projects.

The CYFAR SCP has two strategic objectives:

1. To support community educational programs for at-risk children, youth, and families that are based on locally identified needs, soundly grounded in research and lead to the accomplishment of one of four CYFAR national outcomes focused on early childhood, school-age kids, teens, and parents and families.
2. To integrate CYFAR programming into ongoing extension programs for children, youth and families – ensuring that at-risk, low income children, youth and families continue to be part of extension/4-H programs and have access to resources and educational opportunities.

Each grant recipient receives $660,000 over the course of five years. The Fiscal Year 2010 CYFAR SCP grantees include:

• Alabama A&M University, Normal, Ala., The Teens Making Impact initiative assists at-risk teens in metro regions with developing coping and survival skills, fostering career development and enhancing leadership and community service activities.
• University of Arizona, Tucson, Ariz., The Strengthening Families Program focuses on reducing problem behaviors, improving social competencies, and strengthening parent-child bonds through more effective parenting skills.
• University of Connecticut, Storrs, Conn., The 4-H Teen Urban Gardening Project will teach teens life skills, develop trust and a sense of belonging through supportive relationships with staff, adult community members and each other as they become competent young adults.
• University of Florida, Gainesville, Fla., The GRandS: Grandfamily Resilence and Sustainability project is designed to strengthen relationships in at-risk children being raised by grandparents through parent education, family interaction, and community connections.
• University of Idaho, Moscow, Idaho, The Idaho 4-H Afterschool Outreach to At-Risk Communities will bring afterschool programs to two rural communities and one farm-labor housing complex focusing on science and technology, healthy living and cultural and visual arts.
• Kansas State University, Manhattan, Kan., Linking Food and the Environment: An Inquiry-Based Science and Nutrition Program merges science and nutrition education content with social cognitive learning and self-determination process skills to reduce consumption of unhealthy foods and sedentary habits in diverse racial, ethnic, gender and socio-economic strata youth.
• University of Nevada, Reno, Nev., Literacy First will encourage the involvement and support of Spanish-speaking parents in their children's lives and learning.
• Rutgers University, New Brunswick, N.J., Strong Kids, Stronger Communities establishes a variety of educational opportunities for Latino youth grades kindergarten through 8th grade in urban, at risk communities in community club-based programs.

Through federal funding and leadership for research, education and extension programs, NIFA focuses on investing in science and solving critical issues impacting people's daily lives and the nation's future. For more information, visit www.nifa.usda.gov.

USDA is an equal opportunity provider, employer, and lender. To file a complaint of discrimination, write: USDA, Director, Office of Civil Rights, 1400 Independence Ave., S.W., Washington, D.C. 20250-9410 or call (800) 795-3272(voice), or (202) 720-6382 (TDD).

Media Contact: Jennifer Martin, (202) 720-8188

By Jill Lee
July 13, 2010

Montana State University (MSU) junior Ashley Williams wasn’t sure about her career passion in 2004, only that she wanted to use her geography degree to work internationally and to make a difference. All that came into focus after a chance encounter with entomology professor Florence Dunkel, a USDA Higher Education Challenge Grant and a trip to Sanambele, Mali.  Williams discovered her future in that small farming village of 1,000 people—she found herself as an agricultural researcher. 

“Agriculture? I never even considered it. Now I work as a Forest Service hydrologist and collaborate with farmers on stream restoration projects to protect the environment,” Williams said.

USDA’s Higher Education Challenge Grant, administered by the National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA), was established in 1990 so professors like Florence Dunkel could explore new teaching methods that accommodate diverse student learning abilities. Professors can also use funding to enhance their own teaching or develop a new curriculum and partner with other schools to build capacity.

Grant applicants may request up to $150,000 for a single school. A consortium of three schools may receive as much as $300,000 per project. Applications are awarded annually on a competitive basis. Higher Education Challenge Grants information is available on NIFA’s Web site at www.nifa.usda.gov.

Giving students experiential learning, as Dunkel did, is an important emphasis of the Challenge Grant Program. Ultimately, the program seeks to foster a skilled professional workforce in agricultural research by bringing more qualified students into agriculture degree areas. 

“The Challenge Grant unbound my students from the narrow definitions of agricultural education,” Dunkel said. “Instead of listening to me lecture, they developed a holistic integrated pest management (IPM) plan working with the Sanambele residents. In fact, the idea to ask the Sanambele villagers about what issue they wanted to focus on came from Ashley.”

“Florence gives you a lot of freedom,” Williams said. “She says, ‘Find a problem you’d like to solve, here’s the literature for your research, here’s the funding to get you there. Now go do it.’ It’s kind of scary. Through her program, however, I developed my interest in science and learned how to conduct research that has carried me into graduate school and a future career in water quality.”

Williams’ first research efforts under Dunkel’s guidance told her that diarrhea, mainly from poor water quality, was a major contributor to childhood death worldwide; she had found her problem to address. But when she got to Sanambele, the community had other ideas about what her mission had to be.

“Ashley linked with the Mali Agricultural Research Organization (IER) so they could hold participatory, gender-based focus groups with local farmers to explore what the people considered their most important concerns,” Dunkel said. “In Sanambele, it was malaria that was the most feared killer of children.”

Ashley credits Sidy Ba, a professor at Mali’s agricultural college, and IER’s Assa Kante with helping her ask the right questions in a culturally sensitive way, and for helping her get permission from village chiefs to conduct her surveys. She is now working with Ba on a project relating to diarrhea and water quality in villages near Mopti, Mali, the results of which they plan to publish.

Ba and Kante both know Dunkel from the time they spent earning their graduate degrees at Montana State University in Bozeman.

“As part of my grant project, I invited several Malian agricultural scientists and an engineer to work on their graduate degrees at Montana State University,” Dunkel said. “I did this to create and train mentors for our undergraduate and graduate students in the Higher Education and Secondary Education Challenge grant programs.”

More than 120 students and faculty have traveled overseas, including Native American students who traveled to Mali from Chief Dull Knife Tribal College, in Lame Deer, Mont., who will be the subject of an upcoming PBS documentary.

Other undergraduate or secondary schools have developed lesson plans and research projects based on information gained by the travelers.

“Anyone can adapt their teaching to this kind of experiential learning,” Dunkel explained. “I would encourage anyone to apply to NIFA for a Higher Education Challenge Grant of their own.”

Through federal funding and leadership for research, education and extension programs, NIFA focuses on investing in science and solving critical issues impacting people's daily lives and the nation's future. For more information, visit www.nifa.usda.gov.

USDA is an equal opportunity provider, employer, and lender. To file a complaint of discrimination, write: USDA, Director, Office of Civil Rights, 1400 Independence Ave., S.W., Washington, D.C. 20250-9410 or call (800) 795-3272(voice), or (202) 720-6382 (TDD).

Media Contact: Jennifer Martin, (202) 720-8188

WASHINGTON, July 1, 2010 – A team of researchers from Washington State University and the University of Georgia have found that organic farming increases biodiversity among beneficial, pest-killing predators and pathogens. In potato crops, this led to fewer insect pests and larger potato plants.

“It’s always been a mystery how organic farmers get high yields without using synthetic insecticides,” says co-author Bill Snyder, associate professor of entomology at Washington State University. “Our study suggests that biodiversity conservation may be a key to their success.”

Ecosystems with more total species, and more beneficial species that are
relatively evenly distributed, are thought to be healthiest.  The use of insecticides harms biodiversity by reducing the number of species and by making some species (often pests) much more common than others. The study, which was funded by USDA’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) and published in the July 1 edition of the journal Nature, shows that organic farming practices lead to many equally-common beneficial species, and that this reduces pest problems. 

In potato fields that used conventional control practices (e.g., applications of broad-acting insecticides), usually just one species of beneficial predatory insect or pest-killing pathogen was common. In contrast, in organic fields several beneficial species were about equally common. Experiments showed that groups of evenly-abundant beneficial species, typical of organic farms, were far more effective at killing potato beetle pests. Because natural enemies are usually more even in organic crops of many different kinds, not just potato, these benefits could be widespread.

NIFA funded this project through the National Research Initiative Arthropod and Nematode Biology and Management competitive grants program.
           
Through federal funding and leadership for research, education and extension programs, NIFA focuses on investing in science and solving critical issues impacting people's daily lives and the nation’s future. For more information, visit www.nifa.usda.gov.          

USDA is an equal opportunity provider, employer, and lender. To file a complaint of discrimination, write: USDA, Director, Office of Civil Rights, 1400 Independence Ave., S.W., Washington, D.C. 20250-9410 or call (800) 795-3272(voice), or (202) 720-6382 (TDD).

WASHINGTON, June 30, 2010 –New research by UC Davis wheat geneticist Jorge Dubcovsky and his colleagues could lead to new strategies for improving freezing tolerance in wheat, which provides more than one-fifth of the calories consumed by people around the world.
 
The new findings, published June 22 in the Online First issue of the journal Plant Physiology, shed light on the connection between flowering and freezing tolerance in wheat.
 
In winter wheat and barley varieties, long exposures to non-freezing cold temperatures accelerate flowering time in a process known as vernalization. These exposures also prepare the wheat to better tolerate freezing, a process known as cold acclimation.
 
In their new study, Dubcovsky and his colleagues at UC Davis, The Ohio State University and in Hungary, demonstrated that when the main vernalization gene, VRN1, is expressed in the leaves, it initiates a process that leads to decreased expression of the freezing tolerance genes. (In genetics, "expression" refers to the process by which information carried by the gene is used to create a protein.)
 
"This system enables wheat and other temperate grasses to respond differently to cool temperatures in the fall than they would to cool temperatures in the spring," said Dubcovsky, a professor in UC Davis' Department of Plant Sciences.
 
Dubcovsky heads UC Davis' wheat breeding program and Wheat Molecular Genetics Laboratory. The lab coordinates a broad-based research program that aims to provide the scientific information needed to develop healthier and more productive varieties of wheat.
 
He noted that a cool temperature in the fall, when plants have low levels of the vernalization gene VRN1, activates the freezing tolerance genes, helping to trigger the plants' acclimation to cold temperatures. This is essential in the fall, when cool temperatures are an indication that winter's freezing temperatures are approaching.
 
"However the same cool temperature in the spring, when high levels of the vernalization gene VRN1 are present in the leaves, results in a weaker response of the freezing tolerance genes," Dubcovsky said.  "This avoids initiating the plants' cold-acclimation response, which requires a lot of the plants' energy and is unnecessary in the spring because warmer weather is approaching."
 
This work was supported by the National Research Initiative from the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture.

Through federal funding and leadership for research, education and extension programs, NIFA focuses on investing in science and solving critical issues impacting people's daily lives and the nation’s future. For more information, visit www.nifa.usda.gov.

USDA is an equal opportunity provider, employer, and lender. To file a complaint of discrimination, write: USDA, Director, Office of Civil Rights, 1400 Independence Ave., S.W., Washington, D.C. 20250-9410 or call (800) 795-3272(voice), or (202) 720-6382 (TDD).