Dr. Ray Collier: February 27th, 2025

The Wisconsin Crop Innovation Center - In the public sector, moving plant transformation forward

In addition to having earned two B.S. degrees in Molecular Biology and Botany, Dr. Collier has a diverse pre-graduate school background ranging from studying the rheological properties of asphalt to working in BSL-3 containment on arthropod borne viral diseases of animals. Following a 9 year technical career, including multiple USDA labs, Washington University in St. Louis, and the Danforth Center, Dr. Collier earned his Ph.D. from the Molecular Plant Sciences Program at Washington State University where in the laboratory of Professor Mechthild Tegeder he focused on isolation and functional characterization of plasma membrane transporters of the ureides, the major compounds used for long distance translocation of organic nitrogen in tropical legumes like soybean, cowpea, and common bean. Following a USDA postdoc, including publication of the ddPCR and GAANTRY manuscripts, Dr. Collier moved to Wisconsin and in 2017 started the Molecular Technologies Department within the Wisconsin Crop Innovation Center (WCIC).

The WCIC was established in January of 2017 when the Monsanto company (now Bayer Crop Sciences) gifted to the University of Wisconsin - Madison the Agracetus campus, located in Middleton, Wisconsin. This ~100000 square feet facility, in which a majority of Monsanto dicot transformation projects were conducted between 1996 through 2016, now operates as the largest public sector fee-for-service plant transformation provider in North America. Direct meristem transformation, which helps to mitigate germplasm related transformation recalcitrance, is the core technology upon which the WCIC dicot transformation pipelines have been established, allowing for expedited inception to bag-of-seed project timelines relative to more traditional approaches. On the monocot side the WCIC utilizes our recently published WOX2A gene to facilitate transformation of LH244 maize, an agronomically relevant inbred line very closely related to B73, and is actively conducting research to expand WOX2A utility for other monocots. In addition to fee for service pipelines for plasmid design and assembly, plant transformation, plant analysis, and advancement of single copy homozygous lines to the T2 generation to support regulated field trials, the WCIC is engaged in exciting research projects to enhance plant transformation and facilitate non-destructive identification of desirable plant products. To this end, the WCIC has developed a suite of seed markers that are now standard in all gene editing constructs for soybean, cowpea, and maize, with sorghum, barley, wheat, rice, and Brachypodium versions on the way. We will also share our results describing the challenges of using the physiologically linked RUBY marker. Finally, we will share our recent unpublished results validating our establishment at the WCIC of the GAANTRY system, which enables delivery of very large (>40 Kbp) T-DNA molecules, making the synthetic biology dream of engineering plants with entire metabolic pathways a reality.

https://video.wixstatic.com/video/07711f_780500eb83a14cee887122cac223b0cc/1080p/mp4/file.mp4