The Iowa Stater
February 2002
Tortilla on back burner
Scientist cooks up new projects
Paul Scott says his corn research is branching out into new directions that he finds more tantalizing than his initial goal.Scott, a USDA collaborator and plant geneticist at Iowa State, originally wanted to develop a plant that combined characteristics of corn, such as the taste and ability to grow in various climates, with certain wheat characteristics, like doughiness and flexibility when used as a flour.
He started out to develop grains that could be grown economically and tailored to use as flat breads, such as tortillas. If he put the right wheat gene (one with glutenin, a major factor in giving wheat its "doughiness") into a corn plant, Scott thought the result might be new products to feed developing nations or even the world's first foldable all-corn tortilla.
But the project -- funded by the Iowa Corn Promotion Board and the U.S. Department of Agriculture -- has taken different directions in the four years since it began. Those directions have kept Scott from sending samples of the corn with the wheat gene to the "tortilla testing lab" at Texas A&M.
Strange inheritance
Scott still plans to do that, but first he wants to nail down a few other interesting properties of the glutenous corn. For example, Scott and his students have found that not only does this glutenous-corn exhibit interesting physical properties, it also has enhanced nutritional properties. One of the new corn lines containing the wheat gene has 40 percent more protein, a substantial jump over corn without the gene.
The new corn also has a significant increase in an amino acid that can increase the ability of people and animals to use the corn protein.
Scott now is concentrating on the corn's "strange inheritance trait."
The wheat gene that the researchers use is transmitted from the parent plant to the seeds normally from the female parent through the ear, but very inefficiently from the male parent through pollen. Most corn genes are transmitted with equal efficiency from either parent.
"We've shown this is not specific to just this transgene, but we think it is a general mechanism that can be applied to other transgenic plants," Scott said. "Now we want to figure out exactly what controls pollen transmission of the wheat gene in corn."
Preventing pollen transmission of engineered genes could be good news to those concerned with "pollen drift" from fields of genetically modified corn to non-modified cornfields.
Plants are in his genes
Scott's interest in plant genetics is a cross pollination of several sources. His grandparents were Iowa corn farmers. While growing up in Ames, Scott used the resident expertise of Iowa State to help solve problems he encountered with a boyhood hobby -- a hydroponic garden in the basement of his parents' house. Attending the same church as Griffith Buck, Iowa State's noted rose breeder, helped solidify his interest in plants, and a growing interest in genetics was forged when he bred guppies in high school.
Scott's interest in plants is not limited to his lab. His home, once owned by Bethel Pickett, head of ISU's horticulture and forestry department from 1923 to 1947, includes a backyard greenhouse where he propagates his own seed.
All of which means the world's first foldable, all-corn tortilla will be on the back burner a little longer as Scott and his students pin down the inheritance trait, or until a new branch of their research sprouts.
-- Skip Derra
News Service
 Paul Scott's conventional corn breeding research has branched into the not-so- conventional. Photo by Bob Elbert. |