Agricultural Research Service geneticist Edward Buckler will receive the National Academy of Science's first ever Prize in Food and Agriculture Sciences for pioneering the use of large scale genomic approaches to associate genes with crop traits. This work gives plant breeders' faster access to key genes and reduces the time needed to improve critical traits enhancing food security.
Buckler, who is already an NAS fellow, works at the ARS Plant, Soil and Nutrition Research Unit in Ithaca, N.Y. He has developed an encyclopedic amount of information about maize's natural genetic diversity, which is allowing the best genetic variation to be rapidly combined to produce a more productive, sustainable crop while addressing specific needs such as disease tolerance, nutrient quality or growing environment.
Speeding such variety development is not just scientifically significant, but vital to the nation and food security in the U.S. and elsewhere. Corn varieties bred for North American climates do not work in Africa, producing only about one-fifth the harvest as produced in the United States. Millions of hungry, poor people don't have the hundred years it would take to repeat what conventional breeding did before, Buckler pointed out.
"Dr. Buckler represents one of the best and brightest of ARS's scientific leaders. Ed not only sees the importance of being at the forefront of science but the value and significance of that science in service to the whole world," said ARS Administrator Dr. Chavonda Jacobs-Young. "I am proud that he works for the Agricultural Research Service."
The NAS Prize in Food and Agriculture Sciences recognizes research by a mid-career scientist at a U.S. institution who has made an extraordinary contribution to agriculture or to the understanding of the biology of a species fundamentally important to agriculture or food production. The prize is endowed through generous gifts from the Foundation for Food and Agriculture Research (FFAR) and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Source: www.ars.usda.gov