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Biography |
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Rusty Rodriguez has more than 20 years of experience performing laboratory, field and greenhouse research to study plant-fungal symbioses. He has operated laboratories in academic and federal government institutions, and industry with research encompassing molecular biology, field and soil ecology, plant adaptation and fungal physiology. These research efforts have taken him to a variety of habitats and geographic locations including the Great Basin desert, Great Lakes wetlands, Puget Sound marine ecosystems, Yellowstone National Park geothermal soils and oligotrophic soils of Antarctica.
After receiving a PhD in microbiology at Oregon State University and a postdoctoral position in Plant Pathology at Cornell University, Rusty became an assistant professor of plant pathology (University of California, Riverside) in 1998. There he developed a research program to elucidate genetic differences between pathogenic fungi that cause diseases on plants and closely related mutualistic fungi that convey health benefits to plants. In 1993, he took a position with the U.S. Geological Survey to run a diverse research program involving plant-fungal symbiosis, invasive species, climate change, genetics of threatened and endangered species and outreach to bring science to the public. His research revealed that many plants in natural ecosystems do not adapt themselves to abiotic stress by altering their nuclear genomes. Instead, plants adapt to stress by forming symbiotic interactions with specific fungal endophytes.
In 2012, Rusty Joined Adaptive Symbiotic Technologies (AST) to focus efforts on bringing symbiosis science to the public and develop symbiotic products for generating stress (drought, temperature, salinity) tolerant crops, decreasing agricultural inputs and increasing crop yields. AST has developed several products that are currently undergoing field evaluation with commercialization slated for 2014.
Rusty maintains academic affiliation as a faculty member of Biology at the University of Washington and is currently the president of the International Symbiosis Society (www.iss-symbiosis.org).
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Abstract |
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Symbiogenics: A new Biological Paradigm to Mitigate Drought, Salinity, and Temperature Stress in Agriculture |
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Symbiogenics: A new Biological Paradigm to Mitigate Drought, Salinity, and Temperature Stress in Agriculture
Russell Rodriguez, Adaptive Symbiotic Technologies
The greatest threats to agricultural sustainability in this century are drought, increasing temperatures and soil salinization, all of which are being exacerbated by climate change. Three approaches are currently being taken to develop stress tolerant plants: genetic modification, mutational selection and breeding traits from wild plants. However, these efforts have had limited success presumably because 1) stress tolerance involves genetically complex processes and 2) the ecological and evolutionary mechanisms responsible for stress tolerance in plants are poorly defined.
We have found that plants in natural ecosystems adapt to abiotic stress by forming symbiotic associations with fungal endophytes. Without the endophytes, the plants are not stress tolerant and do not survive in the habitats to which they are adapted. Symbiotically conferred stress tolerance typically occurs in a habitat-specific manner and is based on interactions between environmental factors and both plant and fungal genomes. We have designated this phenomenon as Habitat Adapted Symbiosis (HAS). Although several biochemical processes have been correlated to plant stress tolerance, few processes correlate with symbiotically conferred stress tolerance. Symbiotically conferred stress tolerance involves altered plant gene regulation, increased metabolic efficiency, and an increased ability to manage reactive oxygen species.
Based on our symbiosis research, Adaptive Symbiotic Technologies (AST) has developed BioEnsure® (www.adsymtech.com), a novel microbial inoculant that can be applied to seeds or seedlings to generate stress tolerant crops. BioEnsure® is environmentally safe, scalable, easily transported and distributed, and can be applied to virtually any crop species. BioEnsure® is compatible with maintaining crop biodiversity and will be helpful in developing new agricultural crops from native plant species. Field tests have demonstrated that during periods of high drought and salinity stress, BioEnsure® increases crop yield as much as 85%. During growing seasons with little to no stress, BioEnsure® increases yields from 3-15%. AST has developed proprietary methods to optimize the association between BioEnsure® organisms and individual crop species. Although the focus has been on important staple crops (maize, rice, wheat, barely, soybean), AST has begun to develop BioEnsure® products for many other crop species.
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