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Food, fuel and feed; that’s a lot of stress to place on an ear of corn.

But it’s the kind of stress that has led an Iowa State University research scientist on a journey through the basic genetic structure of corn.

“In a lot of ways, I’ve been preparing for this all my life,” said Patrick Schnable, who first noticed variations in corn when he was a 12-year-old in upstate New York.

Now, Schnable has a laboratory named after him in the Roy J. Carver Co-Laboratory on campus.

It is a place where a supercomputer can substitute as a petri dish, bouncing data off digital information that represents chromosomes and their functions.

Schnable has been a key player in mapping the corn genome, the genetic structure of a hybrid version that first revealed the plant’s ability to grow with vigor and provide yields capable of feeding a hungry world.

The first corn hybrids appeared at the turn of the century and were the result of discoveries that the offspring of different parent plants had characteristics that were superior to those of the parents.

Schnable’s research is important not only to the development of new characteristics of corn, but to other types of plants as well.

“If we understand how corn domesticated, we can apply that to other species,” he said.

Still, the pressing question, given all the demands on a plant that traces its ancestry to a bush, is whether 300-bushel-per-acre corn is around the corner.

“This is the foundation to research that leads to 300-bushel corn,” Schnable said. “But the information to that isn’t there yet.”

In fact, Schnable and a crew of graduate and undergraduate assistants, who also work with other universities, provide the foundation for additional research into corn yields and resistance to diseases and pests that is done on a proprietary basis by private industry.

The Iowa State research is done on an open-source basis, much the way the Internet was developed.

Data from these studies are downloaded nightly or weekly, frequently by companies wanting to find a marketable quality buried in the details of research.

“The companies either tell us that they are downloading the data or we can see it happening on the Internet,” Schnable said.

Companies such as Pioneer Hi-Bred International Inc. add value with proprietary research, he said.

In fact, the development of corn that is resistant to certain herbicides resulted from altering a gene in corn. And Pioneer announced a project earlier this year in which it is testing the development of corn that matures roughly twice as fast as conventional corn.

Much of Schnable’s interest in the research is to trigger additional questions for which there currently are no answers.

Mapping the corn genome is similar to adding houses to a map, he said. The houses provide markers, but raise questions about their occupants.

“We’re at the frontier of knowledge,” Schnable said.

And though that knowledge could lead to development of a “supercorn,” Schnable is more interested in how the research can be applied to addressing problems associated with climate change.

“At this point the discoveries are in the nature of a glue that never dries,” he said. “They are not immediately obvious, but one of them is going to be the next Post-it note.

“A number of discoveries are bizarre and surprising to us, and some are going to be important; I just don’t know what.”

Among discoveries Schnable hopes to find is a way to restore organic matter in soils that might lose their fertility as crop residues are removed and used in the production of biofuels.

“The danger is that we will deplete soil organic matter over time and reduce productivity,” Schnable said.

To counter that, he is attempting to determine whether the decay of plant roots can be prolonged.

“When I talk to farmers about this, they actually get more excited than when I talk about receiving carbon credits,” Schnable said.

Carbon credits are cash payments farmers can receive by using soil-saving tillage methods. The payments are considered a partial solution to reducing pollution and slowing climate change.

“If we look down the road 10 or 15 years, there is a potential problem,” Schnable said. “I’m glad we have at least 10 years to come up with a solution.”

So why turn all of the attention to corn and not another crop?

For one thing, corn is easy to work with, even though it has twice as many genes as a human.

And those genes have had to adopt to environmental changes and efforts to domesticate the plant. All of the plant’s reactions to diseases, drought and pests have become a part of its genetic code.

And much of that code is just made up of “junk,” Schnable said, that can be found in duplicated genes, for example.

“An animal’s nervous system creates a plan of action if something happens,” Schnable said. “A plant has to just tough it out. Within its genome, it has to be hard-wired to tell it what to do.

“And that provides a lot of raw material to do interesting things with.”