The National Institute of General Medical Sciences of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has awarded the department two grants. The first, totaling $573,914, will establish a comprehensive training program for graduate students in genetics, while a second grant of $1,717,371 will be used to advance N.C. State researchers’ studies of DNA sequencing using the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) also has awarded the department $1,798,958 to conduct a joint study of the plant, Arabidopsis thaliana, with Brown University.

This is the second time in recent months that N.C. State has been awarded major grants in the field of genomic science. In September, the department of forestry received $4.4 million from the NSF to support research on gene identification and mapping in loblolly pines.

The training program created by the NIH grant is titled "The Genetic Architecture of Quantitative Traits." Dr. Trudy Mackay, William Neal Reynolds Professor of Genetics, will direct the program with the aid of 13 faculty members from five departments: genetics, animal science, forestry, statistics and zoology.

The grant provides for the education and training of up to five graduate student fellows for a five-year period. The students will receive training in a wide range of genetic disciplines, including developmental, molecular and statistical genetics, and will be encouraged to develop individual interdisciplinary research projects.

Mackay says, "The goal of our program is to train the next generation of scientists, who will be able to apply skills from what used to be considered vastly different disciplines to tackle one of the major problems in genetics."

That problem is the nature of quantitative, or complex, traits. Quantitative traits are those characteristics controlled not by a single gene but by many. The expression of these traits is dictated by the interaction of the multiple genes with each other as well as with the environment to which the individual is exposed. This presents a difficult problem for geneticists, says Mackay, because they cannot infer the genotype, or exact genetic composition, of an individual based on its appearance.

"This is an important problem because most of the traits we are really interested in are complex traits. From an agricultural perspective, characteristics like crop yield, meat quality in livestock and some forms of disease resistance are all complex traits. Most of the traits that are important for feeding the world are complex," she says.

Many important traits in humans are also complex, she adds. Mental illness, longevity and susceptibility to various diseases are all controlled by multiple genes. Understanding the nature of these complex traits will allow scientists to develop advanced treatment and prevention methods.

The second NIH grant was awarded to Mackay and her collaborator, Dr. Charles Langley at the University of California-Davis. It is a four-year grant for a study of DNA sequencing using the common fruit fly as a model. Through the study, the researchers hope to gain a better understanding of how changes in DNA sequencing in genes affecting complex traits affect the variation of those traits in nature.

The National Science Foundation grant focuses on a related genetics topic. The project, "Molecular Evolutionary Ecology of Developmental Plasticity in Arabidopsis thaliana," is headed by N.C. State genetics professor Dr. Michael Purugganan, who will be assisted by Mackay and Dr. Johanna Schmitt of Brown. The goal of this study is a further understanding of the developmental and molecular genetics of the plant Arabidopsis thaliana, with a special focus on an attempt to map the complex gene that codes for the plant’s plasticity.