Plant Genomics Moves into the Limelight

Two major considerations impelled Ronald Phillips [University of Minnesota and Director of the National Research Initiative of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA)], and Michael Freeling (University of California, Berkeley), to organize a recent colloquium, “Protecting our Food Supply: The Value of Plant Genome Initiatives” (Stanford, CA, June 2–5). First, the increased wealth of the developing countries has allowed their populations to make major changes to their diet, particularly by increasing the consumption of meats. To support this internal demand, these countries are steadily increasing their purchases of food on the world market, reducing supplies, and causing prices to rise. Some analysts are predicting that this trend, coupled with the loss of arable land worldwide, will lead to world food shortages within the next 30 years.

A second impetus for the colloquium was the large-scale sequencing of crop–plant genes that has been initiated by a number of companies, beginning in 1996 with a collaboration between Pioneer Hi-Bred International, Inc., and Human Genome Sciences, Inc. (HGS) to sequence maize ESTs. As reported at the colloquium, the amount of sequence data generated by the Pioneer/HGS project has already surpassed that from both the Arabidopsis and rice EST programs. Sequencing initiatives by other companies were also alluded to at the meeting. Private investment in lieu of public support of these programs only serves to further underscore the potential value of plant genomics to agriculture.

The Stanford colloquium was organized to explore the possibility that plant genomics might help to meet the increasing demand for food and to debate whether public financial support was required to ensure that these technologies were available to the broadest groups of researchers.