Dr. Maureen Hanson and her colleagues at Cornell University will establish a Plant Science Center. The Center will provide salaries and supplies for three technicians, for up to 12 undergraduate summer assistantships, up to 12 advanced graduate students (pre-doctorate fellows), and eight postdoctorate fellows. The University will fund an additional two advanced graduate fellows and up to 10 graduate students during their first two years of study. A modest budget allowance will provide for improvements in equipment ("particle gun") that delivers DNA coated on microprojectiles to plant cell nuclei, mitochondria and chloroplasts. This technology was invented, and is being developed cooperatively, by Cornell biologists in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences and engineers at Cornell's National Nanofabrication Facility (now in its 11th year of NSF funding). Co-investigators and their postdocs will be moving into the new Biotechnology Building this summer. The facility, built at a cost of $32 million shared by Cornell and the State of New York, will have a large central plant Cell Culture and Transformation Facility (CCTF). It will operate chiefly for the Center's investigators and their students but it will be available for other Cornell faculty, for visiting scientists, for scientists of the independent but campus-housed Boyce Thompson Institute for Plant Research, and for industrial scientists. In addition to the training program and the CCTF, a third component of the Center is the technology development project. It seeks new means for isolating important plant genes, for the experimental analysis of plant gene function and for transferring genetic information into nuclear and organelle genomes. Central to the latter is biolistics--a term used to denote directed delivery of extracellular DNA or genes, coated on microprojectiles, into discrete structures of intact plant cells. Further development of this new but proven technology is crucial to highly predictable and efficient transformation of model plant systems and agronomically important species. Cornell has long been a notable preparer of students and postdocs for academic and industrial careers in plant science. The Center would unite diverse faculty research in a core theme with a well- conceived multiphasic student training program, and would house them in a state of the art facility dedicated entirely to the faculty in the Sections of Genetics and Development, and Biochemistry, Molecular and Cellular Biology. In addition to the on-campus co-investigators, strong collaborative relationships exist with the University's Agricultural Experiment Station at Geneva, The Boyce Thompson Institute and the USDA's Plant Gene Expression Laboratory at Albany, California. The Center's management and administration will be considerably aided by affiliation with Cornell's five-year old Biotechnology Program which will provide services on-campus as well as visibility and outreach to the State and industrial members. The Program is a consortium of Cornell, the State of New York and several large firms. A fourth element is support derived from the U.S. Army which has named Cornell a Biotechnology Center of Excellence. Presently, in none of these components is there a major emphasis on plant science which will be provided by the Center.
