BGSU biologists fight soybean disease, train new scientists
|BGSU biologists (left to right) Karen Sirum, Paul Morris and
Vipaporn Phuntumart in a field of soybeans last fall| BOWLING
GREEN, O—A new research grant from the U.S. Department of
Agriculture is bad news for soybean diseases but good news for
undergraduates studying biology. Three Bowling Green State
University biologists — Drs. Paul Morris, Vipaporn Phuntumart
and Karen Sirum — are part of a team of 28 scientists that has
been awarded a five-year, $9.28 million grant by USDA National
Institute of Food and Agriculture. Led by Dr. Brett Tyler of
Virginia Bioinformatics Institute, the project’s goal is to
engineer new disease-resistance strategies to reduce soybean
crop yield losses due to root and stem rots. In addition,
because of the increasing amounts of genetic data that are
becoming available, part of the funding will be used to prepare
a new generation of biologists to sequence DNA and analyze
information related to plant and other genomes. BG