The Green Team : Scientists Combine Skills to Develop Drought-Resistant Plants

Horticultural geneticists and plant enzymologists seldom talk to each other. The two branches of botany use the same language but their dialects are so different they rarely translate works to compare notes.

But at Texas Tech’s Plant Stress and Water Conservation Lab, scientists from a number of disciplines have learned to speak a common language: drought.

“Most enzymologists talk only with enzymologists,” said James Mahan, a plant physiologist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture. “But here, I talk to all sorts of different people. That’s why this interdisciplinary approach is so important.”

The lab’s goal is to find varieties of wheat, corn, cotton, onions and other plants that can survive the harsh weather of the Great Plains stretching from Canada to Texas, with its frequent drought, bitter cold and stifling heat.

The results include drought-resistant cotton and wheat, a sorghum resistant to insects called midges, and grapevines with tougher leaves to withstand hail.

Although it focuses on U.S. crops and conditions, the research has international implications, said Robert Albin, associate dean of research at Texas Tech’s College of Agricultural Sciences. “In Lubbock, we’re representative of the arid and semiarid areas of the world, such as central and western Africa. A large part of the world’s land surface is semiarid.”

John Burke, another USDA scientist studying plant enzymes, said almost all the research has international applications: “These crops are grown throughout the world. This research holds true no matter where you are.”

Burke works with Ellen Peffley, a Texas Tech assistant professor of horticulture specializing in onion genetics. She is trying to develop onions that can withstand extreme cold. Burke identifies enzymes that make onions more cold-hardy, and Peffley tries to get the onions to make those enzymes.

“As we discover the basic mechanics, this can be applied to all crop species,” she said.

More than 50 scientists and graduate students from Texas Tech, the USDA and Texas A&M; participate in the research at various labs and agriculture stations; there is no centralized lab--a major shortcoming that Texas Tech is moving to counter with a $500,000 federal grant toward planning a $17-million complex.

“It gets to be quite complicated and we have to keep people together and coordinated,” Albin said. “We’re in such a specialized area of research. You might have a molecular scientist discover something important, but he doesn’t know how to grow the plant, so you have the A&M; research station for that.

“We’ve got to keep coordination in mind. A geneticist might get caught up transferring gene A into plant B and lose sight of what it’s all about.”

Congress formally created the Plant Stress and Water Conservation Lab in 1988, but the research had been going on at Texas Tech since the late 1950s. The USDA picked Lubbock as the center of the research because of the university, the lack of rain, and temperatures that drop below zero in winter and soar above 100 in summer.

Scientists affiliated with the lab are enthusiastic, although they sometimes are at a loss for words to explain their research in lay terms--or in those of scientists from other fields.

“We have some sort of common goal in mind,” said Henry Nguyen, a Tech associate professor who specializes in finding drought-resistant cereals. “We see how we can mutually benefit each other with our kinds of techniques.

“It just takes a lot of patience talking, until we understand what each other is doing.”