USU gets patent for seed-cloning process

Utah State University, Logan, has won a patent for a revolutionary seed reproduction technique that potentially could feed millions more people around the world.

In addition, the Logan-based university has licensed the technology to Gemini Life Sciences of Sugar City, Idaho. Gemini recently won a $2 million grant from the National Institute of Standards and Technology to further develop the process.

The technique is called apomixis, in which plants reproduce asexually. The offspring plants are clones of the mother plant, identical in every detail, and further generations also are capable of apomixis.

A USU press release adds that this process of reproducing seeds through cloning "could feed millions of people throughout the world and add billions to the United States agriculture economy."

"The seed forms without the male gender, essentially," John Carman, USU professor of plant genetics, the developer of the process to induce apomixis among crops, said in a telephone interview.

Apomixis, or asexual reproduction, happens naturally sometimes within some plants. Other species reproduce that way exclusively, such as dandelions and certain lawn grass. The new development is a process to make crop plants reproduce through apomixis when they normally do so through sexual reproduction.

Key to the value of that type of reproduction is that the seeds are hybrids, and hybrids tend to be more vigorous than the parent varieties. The hybrid process could produce crops that are 15 to 50 percent higher-yield, according to the university.

Since 1979, USU researchers have studied how this phenomenon evolved in nature, Carman said. They wanted to know how it happened in the wild "so that we could reproduce that evolution process in crop plants."

About 10 years ago they made discoveries about how plants evolved through hybridization, most of them during the Ice Age. As changing climate forced plants from higher latitudes to migrate to lower regions, they ran into plants of the same species that had evolved in those places. They were able to reproduce, but the slight differences in the two types of plants meant they had different timing in the development of their seeds.

"We studied the reproductive timing of these plants inside the tiny flowers, with microscopes," Carman told the Deseret Morning News. Once they discovered the secret of how to induce apomixis, they began working with sorghum, a grass grown for syrup, animal feed and other purposes.

"The process will work with all flowering plants," he added. "That includes corn and rice."

They have not started working on rice and corn yet, because sorghum seems to be an easier task. "Once we have that (sorghum) working we'll go on to other crops," he said.

"We're getting some really good preliminary results in sorghum."

According to USU, the patent is Number US 6,750,376 B1, titled "Methods for Producing Apomictic Plants." It was issued to the university on June 15.

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