SBIR-STTR Award

The world is facing unprecedented challenges in food systems (i.e. on farm profitability and public demand for environmental health) due to climate change water scarcity diminution of arable lands and population increase to nearly 8 billion people. Alfalfa (Medicago sativa) is a perennial nitrogen-fixing legume with tremendous potential benefits to soil health environmental health and contribution to animal and human nutrition. As one of the world's oldest domesticated forage crops alfalfa is grown on six continents and is the fourth most important economic crop in the United States. Traits such as higher yields stress tolerance and biomass quality (improved digestibility and nutrient composition) have been targeted by alfalfa breeders to benefit farmers cattle growers and beef/dairy industries. Although numerous breeding and biotechnology efforts have aimed to improve such traits traditional genetic improvement techniques such as constitutive gene silencing methods have had negative consequences when applied to commercial crops. For example improving forage quality by lowering lignin often resulted in plants with poor structural integrity and diminished biomass yield at maturity. This proposed SBIR Phase I research project develops an efficient approach to fine-tune lignin biosynthesis and biomass composition while increasing biomass yields in alfalfa. Moreover an additional feed quality trait enabled by our genetic engineering strategy towards mitigating enteric methane emissions has the potential to improve the sustainability of meat and milk production. Our molecular metabolic and phenotypic characterizations of these new engineered alfalfa lines generated in Phase I will represent valuable material for 1) future verification at greenhouse/field environments and 2) trait transfer into elitegermplasms via licensing and breeding. If the project demonstrates the abovementioned goals in alfalfa this new biotechnology platform could be applied to other perennial forage/pasture species that currently cover 121.1 million acres in the United States (6% of the U.S. surface area).