“Amazing protein diversity” is discovered in corn plant

The genome of the corn plant – or maize, as it’s called almost everywhere except the US – “is a lot more exciting” than scientists have previously believed. So says the lead scientist in a new effort to analyze and annotate the depth of the plant’s genetic resources. “Our new research establishes the amazing diversity of maize, even beyond what we already knew was there,” says Doreen Ware, Ph.D., of the US Department of Agriculture and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) in New York. “This diversity is fascinating in its own right and at the same time has great import for agriculture.”  In all, 111,151 RNA transcripts from genes being expressed in six different maize tissues were read and analyzed in the research. About 57% of these messages had never been seen – and therefore had never been sequenced. “These were the messages that told us that our efforts to annotate and characterize the 2009 maize reference genome have been far from complete,” says Bo Wang, Ph.D., a postdoctoral investigator in Ware’s lab and first author of the paper reporting the new research. What makes one maize plant potentially much different from any other, even individuals of the same variety, is the way its genes are capable of being expressed, depending on conditions both internal to the plant and in the surrounding environment, e.g., levels of soil moisture, nutrients, or available light.