Organic collaboration propagates National Science Foundation grant
Two Virginia Tech plant researchers have received part of a $1 million National Science Foundation grant sparked by both curiosity and collaboration.
James Westwood has come to believe that parasitic weeds are not just cunning adversaries but also likely to be potential heroes in plant genomics.
“I’ve come from the background of trying to think about practical control of parasitic weeds, and now I’ve come around to thinking about it as a tool where it’s used for something good,” said Westwood, professor in the School of Plant and Environmental Sciences. “I was not prepared for this, yet this is where science can take you if you just keep following your curiosity.”
Westwood has been following that curiosity for three decades. His research of the invasive interlopers, along with multiple long-time collaborators, has led to a $1 million National Science Foundation grant to study the use of parasitic plants for a new method of plant genetic manipulation that could enhance food production.
Westwood’s collaborators include the following:
- Bastiaan Bargmann, assistant professor in the School of Plant and Environmental Sciences at Virginia Tech
- Michael Axtel, professor at Pennsylvania State University
- Soyon Park, assistant professor at the University of Missouri
Westwood has been cultivating these collaborations for years. He has worked with Bargmann since the latter’s arrival at Virginia Tech in 2019, with Axtel for over 12 years, and Park was Westwood’s postdoctoral fellow before moving to Missouri a few years ago. With the new funding, Westwood and Bargmann have been able to hire their first joint researcher, Matilda Cashman '24, to help with this project full time.
Like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle fitting together, Westwood said that the aspects of the researchers’ various projects came together at about the same time for the overall research goal of using genetically modified parasitic weeds, Cuscuta campestris, to manipulate the genomic properties of a host plant.
The researchers believe the findings could help address an increasing global demand for food caused by climate changes or growing populations.
“One way to address them is through traditional breeding, which is relatively slow. It could take a decade or more to bring a new crop to the market,” said Bargmann, an affiliated faculty with the Translational Plant Sciences Center. “The application of biotechnology tools can greatly speed that up, or maybe even allow us to obtain traits that we couldn’t get through traditional breeding, such as drought tolerance, increased nutritional benefits, or disease resistance.”
There are several challenges to the traditional method of plant genetic modification. The first is the amount of time it takes for a plant to regenerate from tissue samples that have been genetically modified cells.
“This is a novel and innovative idea of using cuscuta as a way to introduce genetic changes without having to go through the tissue culture step,” said Bargmann. “We basically infect the plant with the parasite and that will do the job for us. Then hopefully the next generation of seeds will have that genetic modification in it, which would be transformative technology.”
Cuscuta’s attachment to a host plant is similar to a graft junction of two plants in the same species that allows the RNA and proteins to travel across the graft junction.
“We know that the RNA and proteins will move from the parasite to the host, and if that could end up being transferred into the seed for a permanent genetic change, then that kind of completes the circuit of what we need to work,” said Westwood, an affiliate with the Invasive Species Collaborative and theTranslational Plant Sciences Center.
Using a parasite to alter plants is not particularly new. Bargmann points out that bacteria are parasitic pathogens scientists have been using for years to transfer DNA and transform plants for desired results. What is novel is the use of a parasitic weed as a tool to genetically modify its host so that its seeds pass on that modification.
Another challenge with the more common genetic modification methods is the unpredictability of transferability of the method from one subspecies to another. For example, if one soybean plant is successfully modified, it is not a given if another varient of that soybean will be successfully altered using the same techniques.
“Even with soybeans, there are many varieties, and they’re not all as amenable to transformation as others. There’s certain ones that you can transform more easily and others that just will not,” said Westwood, an affiliate with the Fralin Life Sciences Institute. “There’s still a big bottleneck to using genetic engineering even in what you would think would be well known systems. It’s not that easy.”
Westwood says that using the cuscuta parasite as a genetic modifier might address this because the parasite has a broad host range. It can attach to multiple hosts from different species and that often extends from one genotype variety to most others. In addition, the attached cuscuta vines create “bridges” between each of its different hosts, making it ideal for genomic modification.
“Weeds have always been a neglected and understudied area, and underappreciated,” Westwood said. “But nothing is ever as simple as you think. This is why we keep going forward.”
