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Michigan State University molecular plant scientist Dan Chitwood has received a $640,000 grant, part of a larger $1.5 million collaborative award from the National Science Foundation, to learn how to predict a plant’s phenotype — its observable physical traits — from its genetic makeup or molecular profile.
While current sequencing technologies allow the extraction of nearly all information from the genome, Chitwood said measuring what an organism is or what it eventually becomes has not advanced as far as genomic sequencing. He adds that scientists have not yet been able to measure the totality of information embedded in an organism’s physical form, like they have in genomes.
“If we could extract all the information that is contained within organisms, we would be able to create a model predicting what the organism is from its genomic information – which remains a Grand Challenge in biology,” he said.
SOURCE: MSU AgBioResearch
