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4B Daily News – Tuesday, September 13, 2011 Researchers study sex life of corn SAN JOSE (MCT) — In a sun-dappled cornfield on the Stanford campus, romance is in the air. There's a LeBron James-like swag to the tall male tassels. Round female ears await, coquet- tishly. But corn conception, and development, is poorly understood. So biology professor Virginia Walbot devotes her career to tack- ling one of botany's big puzzles: The sex life of corn. "It is really one of the deep fundamental myster- ies of plants," she said, during a recent walk through late summer's tow- ering stalks. "It is exceed- ingly important to under- stand every step of the process, so we can produce better seeds for American farmers." Her lab's discoveries in developmental biology could help change how corn is grown and boost yield. An estimated 80 million acres of corn are planted in America every year. Inno- vations in plant reproduc- tion could add to the pro- ductivity of that acreage if, for example, farmers could plant more densely and use less gas, fertilizer and water. But that juicy ear on your picnic plate? It almost didn't happen. The parent plant could have just as easily decided to make a big green leaf instead, Walbot said. No one knows why, or how, corn decides to create a female ear or a male tassel. Or simply grow more veg- etation. "How does that switch occur, from being vegeta- tive to reproductive? What are the early steps that it commits to, to produce sperm or eggs?" she asked. "It's still unclear." Walbot has a lifelong affection for corn, having helped grow and sell it from her family's truck farm in Southern Califor- nia, on fertile acreage now covered by a runway at Los Angeles International Airport. As a little girl, "I asked for plants, not dolls," she recalled. Studying at Stanford, then Yale, she got interest- ed in the bigger picture: plant development and evolution. The most piv- otal moment in her life came in the 1970s, when she met pioneering geneti- cist Barbara McClintock, who also worked with corn. They shared long phone conversations, then Walbot visited McClin- tock's Cold Spring Harbor lab — and she was hooked. Like McClintock, Wal- bot is part of a long tradi- tion of scientists who have found corn to be the per- fect organism for answer- ing some of the fundamen- tal questions about plant genetics and development. That's because each ear has a few hundred seeds, making it easy to generate huge populations very quickly. This means that even a rare event, like a particular mutation, is easy to find. Her small Stanford field is rich with corn history, evoking memories of "The Farm" that drew founder Leland Stanford to the peninsula. Adjacent is the small summer home — now boarded up, its paint peeling and doors latched —where Nobel Prize-win- ning geneticist George Beadle lived in the early '40s so he could be close to his plants. "We keep track of every Education Calendar September, 2011 Childbirth Class (9/1 - 10/6) Thursdays 6:30pm-8:30pm Columba Room 529-8026 Community BLS/CPR 6:00pm-10:00pm 9/13 2nd Tuesday Columba Room, 529-8026 Grief Support Group 3:00pm-5:00pm Every Thursday Coyne Center, 528-4207 Waterbirth Class 5:00pm-9:00pm 9/14 • Wednesday Columba Room, 529-8026 tures respond to stress. Animals can move when times get tough. But plants are stuck in place — so they're forced to change. They might drop leaves. Or if times improve, add new leaves, grow tall, or reproduce. But how? In the tips of their shoots is a complicat- ed sequence of genetic on- off switches. That's what she seeks to better under- stand. "If we understood this early step, we could inhib- it it," she said, so farmers could hit a pause-button on reproduction. "Or we could help engineer a tas- sel that's not so huge ... so the plant's energy goes into making more and larger kernels." So she waits for her MCT photo Virginia Walbot is dwarfed by the corn stalks in a small cornfield used for genetic research at Stanford University in Palo Alto on Sept. 2.Walbot is a geneticist who is studying the reproduction aspect of corn in hopes that her discoveries can one day change how corn is grown to possibly boost yield. ear, in perpetuity," she said. "It's like the kings and queens of England," she said. "We can go back 30 years and tell you the whole history of a plant — who's who. ... It's very valuable material." There's nothing illicit going on in this field. Rather, Walbot's team practices "safe sex," so each pollination is careful- ly controlled. Walbot polli- nates by hand, carefully selecting mates. Then, to prevent added random pollination, the pollen-laden tassels are covered with paper bags so they won't drift onto near- by ears, which are the corn's eggs. The ears are also bagged. Then each bag is identified with the date of pollination, and its parentage — "8/16 — 88- 11," for instance. In these dwindling sum- mer days, pollination is almost over. Then Walbot will wait for seed to mature. She'll harvest from Sept. 20 to Oct. 10. Then the ears will be placed on wax paper, and stored for a week in a warm walk-in drying room. Once dried, seeds are stored — they can last a decade — in a special room near her campus lab- oratory, where it's cool and dry. (Or they may be sent to a national seed bank in Illinois; Stanford has con- tributed 40,000 seeds there.) Using microscopes and high-end tech tools, she studies the kernel's DNA to learn what genes, or sequence of genes, might trigger development. She also studies mutations that alter how genes behave. This is what's unique about plants: Unlike ani- mals, they are continuous- ly making new organs, like leaves, from scratch. So scientists such as Walbot can study the development of the same type of organ, over and over. "It's like a human pro- ducing new hands every week," she said. "If you need to repair a watch, you'd grow little bitty hands. Or if you want to M-F YOUR PET FOOD SOURCE Hermit Crabs$ 345 So. 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She thinks this differ- ence relates to how crea- new kernels to mature in late summer's warm sun, hoping that nature will reveal, begrudgingly, a new clue to the genetic puzzle of plant develop- ment. "Every question that is answered raises three more questions," she said, brightly. "You always have more things you can explore, rather than fewer, over time."