The Rocky Mountain Collegian

Issue date: 1/19/07 Section: News

Paul Covey (left), a botony graduate student, discusses a breed of tomato plant with Dr. Patricia Bedinger (left) a professor of Biology Thursday afternoon in the Plant Biotech Greenhouse

Jesse French has worked on a project that, when all said and done, will have covered the span of at least four years and required about $4 million in funds.

Not bad for a CSU student in his first year of study.

Last semester, French was one of a group of honors biology students in their freshman year looking to make a contribution to a potentially groundbreaking research project involving genetic structures of tomato plants.

"It's been a cool opportunity to be exposed to a really relevant issue inside the science world," said French, an animal science major. "I don't know if it's an opportunity that most students have and it's been important to us."

The project is complex, to say the least, and involves the study of complicated genetic structures and their interactions with each other. The overall goal of the project, however, is simple.

"I can even explain it to my mother," said professor Pat Bedinger, the creator of the experiment. "The basic idea is to uncover how closely-related species keep from mating with each other."

In other words, many people have seen the domestic tomato plant growing in their garden. On the other hand, no one has seen a fundamentally super-domestic tomato plant that has picked up characteristics from one of the nine types of wild tomato plants.

The reason for that is because the domestic type knows to reject the pollen of the wild types. Bedinger wants to find out how.

"When I became a full-time professor at CSU I had the opportunity to decide how I wanted to spend the rest of my career," Bedinger said. "It's a question in biology that was very important but poorly understood. That's always the two things you want when deciding on a research project."

The end results of the experiment could have an unlimited impact on the science domain, but there are two primary goals already set in place.

"Wild species have good genes in them that we'd like to figure out how to get into the domestic plants," Bedinger said. "They are more resistant to disease. Another concern is that pollen from genetically modified crops like we grow in the U.S. will somehow get transmitted to wild species. They're really worried about that in Europe."

Continued...

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