University of Guelph researcher Manish Raizada recently published a piece about the positives of corn silk.
Through his research, Raizada learned that corn silks naturally contain diverse microbes.
“Natural selection may have put in a biome and beneficial bacteria in the silk,” Raizada said.
The discovery of this microbiome in corn silk may help improve breeding and farming practices.
Raizada said another impact of this discovery has to do with harmful fungal infections. Specifically, the fungus fusarium.
Fusarium is a fungus widely distributed in plants and soils. In bananas, it causes Panama disease. For corn, fusarium infects the corn’s seedlings, causing rot in the corn. In 2018, a fusarium outbreak in Ontario led to a 40 percent loss in sales for producers.
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The 2018 shortage is one of the reasons why Raizada started this research.
“Corn and other grain farmers are often working at the margins and a disease like fusarium can really ruin their profits.”
The discovery of the microbiome brings more knowledge of fusarium, as well.
“The population of Canadian corn that we examined has at least 5,000 species of bacteria in the silks,” Raizada said. “And although humans have been growing corn for 9,000 years, we never knew this. So, these bacteria include those that fight fusarium. At least, currently under lab conditions.”
Of these 5,000 species of bacteria, 10 accounted for about half of the entire microbiome.
Raizada said there is potential for future research, too. The corn silks host more than just the microbiome – they are home to insects, as well.
“Some insects lay their eggs on silks,” he said. “Some may be helping with drought. That’s an area of future research.
“If drought hits during silk formation, they can’t receive the pollen, and there’s a failure to produce grain.”
Although the report has been published, the research is still ongoing.
“In parallel to this study, what we have not reported is that we actually isolated more than a thousand strains of bacteria in our lab from the silks,” Raizada said.
“We are now testing these in greenhouse and field trials to see if we can develop sprays that can be used instead of fungicides to stop not only fusarium but other fungi, possibly insects, possibly overcome drought and low nitrogen.”
Eman Khalaf was the lead scientist of the research. She said this research started in 2016, and the analysis began in 2018.
Many different experiments were done, with a few goals in mind in terms of the information found.
“So we aimed to first to explore if there is a microbial community inhabiting this delicate tissue or not,” Khalaf explained, “and if this microbiome is responsive to the climactic variability, so that’s why we replicated the experiment in two sets of years, and if the microbiome of this tissue is resilient to the Fusarium infection or other biological stressors.”
But like Manish said, there is still more research being done.
“We started at the same time another project involving other reproductive organs in the corn that we are planning to resume in 2022,” Khalaf said.
