Brachypodium distachyon (brachy) has emerged as a cornerstone for research pertaining to key energy and food crops as well as biomass processing. Work in these areas is a point of interest in no less than twelve labs at UMass Amherst. This ensemble of laboratories comprises our Brachy Consortium, where we collaborate to advance plant and microbial science.
We have several research themes and participating faculty to provide opportunities to conduct research using brachy as a model system.
UMass Brachypodium Consortium microbiologists and plant biologists teamed up to develop an assay to measure the feedstock quality of plant biomass. Clostridium phytofermentans is a soil bacterium isolated from Harvard Forest in Massachusetts by Tom Warnick and Sue Leschine. Remarkable characteristics of this bacterium include the ability to degrade essentially all plant polysaccharides and produce copious amount of ethanol. The Hazen lab demonstrated that some mutants of the energy crop sorghum were converted to ethanol more quickly than normal varieties. They also showed similar differences in ethanol production in the energy crop shrub willow and among different accession of Brachypodium distachyon. This approach is now being used to characterize mutants and genetic mapping populations and potentially energy crop breeding programs.
Dr. Ludmila Tyler joined the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and the Consortium beginning this year, 2012. She hales from Dr. John Vogel’s USDA laboratory, perhaps the most prolific B. distachyon group in the world. She is a leading expert in the field of trait and genetic diversity found within the species and managed a project conducted by the DOE – Joint Genome Institute to sequence the genomes of over 50 different strains. At UMass, Dr. Tyler will continue to explore bioenergy-relevant crop traits using natural and induced genetic variation in B. distachyon.
Brachypodium distachyon (brachy) has emerged as a cornerstone for research pertaining to key energy and food crops as well as biomass processing. Work in these areas is a point of interest in no less than twelve labs at UMass Amherst. This ensemble of laboratories comprises our Brachy Consortium, where we collaborate to advance plant and microbial science.
