Steven Strauss
Oregon State University, OR·Plant Science & Agriculture
Modern biotechnology lets scientists insert and precisely edit genes in crops to improve traits such as stress resistance and product quality. In most woody plants, though, very few cells take up a new gene and grow back into whole modified plants.
- Fields
Plant Science & Agriculture
Genetics
Microbiology & Immunology
- Topics
Agrobacterium
plant transformation
genetic transformation
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Aug 2027
What they work on
- Screen about 100 sequenced wild Agrobacterium strains for their ability to transform poplar and induce transgenic shoots, and identify the strains with the highest rates.
- Analyze why transformation efficiency differs among Agrobacterium strains and poplar genotypes, by studying how high-performing strains interact with specific plant genotypes.
- Determine the roles of specific genes on the T-DNA, the DNA segment Agrobacterium transfers into plant cells, in boosting transformation and regeneration in Populus.
- Engineer stronger Agrobacterium strains by adding beneficial T-DNA genes to domesticated strains and by domesticating high-performing wild strains.
More about the research
This step, called transformation, is a major bottleneck. Agrobacterium, a soil bacterium that naturally moves a piece of its DNA (the T-DNA) into plant cells, is the standard tool for transformation. This project asks whether natural variation among wild Agrobacterium strains can make transformation of woody plants much more efficient.
Why it matters
Low transformation and regeneration rates block gene-based improvement of most woody crops. More effective Agrobacterium strains could make it practical to engineer trees and other hard-to-modify crops for traits such as stress resistance and quality. This could help breeders and agriculture cope with climate change, and aid functional genomics research in many crop species.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Yiping Qi
University of Maryland, MD·Plant Science & Agriculture
Establish a shoot apical meristem-based transformation method that works across multiple wild and domesticated einkorn wheat accessions, measuring delivery and germline transmission with GFP and RUBY reporters.
Mohammad Rahman
Alabama State University, AL·Plant Science & Agriculture
Screen diverse quinoa genotypes under contrasting nitrogen conditions to identify varieties that stay productive with reduced nitrogen fertilizer.
Benjamin Blackman
University of California-Berkeley, CA·Plant Science & Agriculture
Characterize the cell types and gene expression patterns that arise as sunflower tissue attempts to regenerate, using tissue-level analyses and single-nucleus transcriptomics, which reads gene activity in individual cell nuclei.
The school
Oregon State University: 29 labs on PI Pages, $372M a year on research, 238 research doctorates a year.
Reach out
A start for your email. Fill in the brackets.