August 2009: GDCB Professor Drena Dobbs receives sponsored funding from NSF

Dr. Drena Dobbs, Professor of GDCB; Dr. Daniel Voytas, collaborating faculty in GDCB and Director of the Beckman Center at the University of Minnesota; and Dr. J. Keith Joung, Professor at Harvard Medical School; have been awarded $3,365,001 by the National Science Foundation for their collaborative research project entitled “NSF TRPGR: Precise Engineering of Plant Genomes using Zinc Finger Nucleases.” Dr. Kan Wang, Professor of Agronomy and Director of ISU's Plant Transformation Facility is coPI on the ISU sub-contract award of $916,295.

The newly funded project will develop improved methodologies to enable genomics scientists to readily target and modify specific genes in plants and other organisms, including human. In collaboration with the Zinc Finger Consortium http://www.zincfingers.org/, the team has generated efficient platforms and computational resources for zinc finger protein (ZFP) engineering. At ISU, the Dobbs group will generate improved computational tools that reduce the time and expense required to design ZFPs and choose target sites that function successfully in vivo; the Wang group will develop improved protocols for gene targeting in rice, allowing researchers to better exploit the many genetic resources available for this model crop. Graduate research assistantships and seed funding for preliminary experiments that contributed to the success of the NSF proposal were provided by GDCB, BCB and CIAG at ISU, and an MGET training grant from the USDA.