Science Market Update

A grant from the National Science Foundation has provided $4.8 million research funding for UC Riverside enabling researchers Susan R. Wessler, and Jason Stajich to investigate  various rice cultivars using genome sequencing and seeing how these cultivars react to drought, disease, and flooding.  

The rice plants are mutagenized with Transposable Elements (TE), which identify interesting characteristics within a particular strain and help locate specific elements causing a characteristic within that gene.  

With the current severe weather and climate stresses on agriculture as a whole, this research is very timely, rice being one of the main global food staples .  Additionally the  funding will  allow researchers to generate resources in the scientific community, enabling them to follow TE movement and find out how traits are determined by the insertion of a TE in a gene.