Robert Hill is getting close.
University of Manitoba researcher Robert Hill may have made a significant discovery, but he’s not ready to divulge the details yet.
“I can talk around it, but I don’t want to talk directly to it, because I would like to publish another paper in Nature,” Hill said with a laugh.
The good-natured plant scientist, who is best known for his work on how plants react to drought and other stressors, hopes to follow up on his success in 2006, when his U of M team became the first in the world to discover a receptor for abscisic acid (ABA), a hormone that controls a plant’s response to environmental stress.
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“We could make the plant delay flowering … via this particular hormone receptor, and that we got published in Nature,” he said.
Since that discovery, Hill and his team of nine, comprising graduate students, post-doctoral students and a lab technician, have worked with a team from Australia to study how that gene works in barley.
“We can take something like a malting barley variety … and prevent that malting barley seed from germinating,” Hill said, which is significant because barley seed germinates 95 percent of the time.
“So what we have to do is prove this. And we’ve got almost everything in place.”
The hormone receptor gene is common to all crops and if Hill is right, plant scientists could alter how a seed reacts to conditions such as drought or extend the time that a seed fills, leading to greater yield.
“We’re all aware that if you have a hot, dry summer, the yields go down, but the protein content of the grain goes up. Cool climates (like Washington state) have some of the record yields in the world,” Hill said.
“That’s always what I’ve been interested in – what’s affecting storage development … and what happens when you have particular stresses on that seed.”
Others are also interested in Hill’s research, including big players in the seed industry who are keenly interested in anything related to yield.
“This (research) is a very important aspect of the seed development stage to study, because it has a direct effect on yield,” said Reno Pontarollo, chief scientific officer at Genome Prairie, an independent federal agency that partially funds Hill’s work.
“Therefore, when you’re talking to the seed development companies in the world … whenever they look at a value-added trait coming from an academic researcher, the first thing on their list is how does that trait affect yield? Because yield is king.”
Getting to this point, on the verge of another discovery, has not happened overnight, Hill said. He has been studying ABA in barley since the early 1990s.
Michael Trevan, agriculture dean at the U of M, said Hill’s success is a testament to the value of long-term funding.
“It’s taken a long time to get there and it could only have happened because there has been some stability in the research funding.”
While it has been a long haul, Hill said he stuck with the research because like most academics, he receives satisfaction from piecing together the puzzle.
He expects that one of the applications of this research will be a new and important tool for plant breeders.
“Plant breeding is essentially a crapshoot. It’s trial and error,” he said.
His research on the biological processes inside the seed may allow breeders to move beyond the gaming tables and transform plant breeding into a more exact science.
