Welcome to the Kellogg Lab’s collections site. We invite you to follow our progress during the first phase of the PanAnd project, where we collect wild grasses in the Andropogoneae tribe across their geographical range in North America and Australia. In collaboration with several other labs and field organizations, this project will use nearly a thousand species, collectively representing over a billion years of evolutionary history, to understand the rules of convergence and constraint in grass genomes with an aim to model fitness under drought and temperature stress.
This project would not be possible without funding from The National Science Foundation (IOS #1822330), and our collaborators and co-PIs:
Edward Buckler (USDA-ARS, PI); Santosh Deshpande (ICRISAT, Collaborator); Sarah Hearne (CIMMYT, co-PI); Matthew Hufford (ISU, co-PI); Elizabeth Kellogg (Danforth, co-PI); Sara Miller (Cornell, Business Manager); Cinta Romay (Cornell, Project Manager); Robert Ross (PRI, Outreach); Jeffrey Ross-Ibarra (UC-Davis, co-PI); Adam Siepel (CSHL, co-PI); Qi Sun (Cornell, co-PI).
Field collections are conducted by Elizabeth Kellogg (Donald Danforth Plant Science Center), Chrissy McAllister (Principia College), Taylor AuBuchon-Elder (Donald Danforth Plant Science Center), and Pat Minx (Donald Danforth Plant Science Center)
Website created by Taylor
Special thanks to Sally Fabbri and The Donald Danforth Plant Science Center greenhouse team
“Wild species hold clues for crops”
NOAA’s Temperature outlook for December 2018 with majority of US highlighted in “warmer than normal” conditions
With an increasing global population and changes in climate, plant and biodiversity research has become more vital than ever; and even more so - research in crop productivity. One way to investigate this subject is by looking into wild species related to today’s crops like maize and sorghum.
Andropogoneae grasses are highly productive and water-efficient
Figure from Pan-And grant proposal
The grass tribe, Andropogoneae, consists of over 1,100 species including maize and sorghum dispersed across the globe spanning 15 million square kilometers. With their C4 photosynthesis, they are some of the most productive plants in the world for grain, biofuels, and sugar. Some thrive in extreme heat and drought while others, even of the same species, have adapted to thrive in extreme cold and wet conditions. With their wide geographical range and diverse ecotypes, the Andropogoneae family still harbors a diverse set of alleles to allow this adaptability, despite being similar in phenotype and development.
By sampling this clade across as many different environments as possible, we can identify adaptations in abiotic stress tolerance, and find answers that may help enable crops in the future to better adapt to warming climates.
“Grasses attract little attention - but they are the meek that inherit the earth. They form a highly specialized family with a greater number of species than any other except the orchids, the composites, and the legumes. Grasses have been so successful in the struggle for existence that they have a wider geographic range than any other plant family, and they occupy all parts of the earth.”
