The innovation and discovery made by scientists from four different universities, Boyce Thompson Institute, DuPont Crop Genetics Research, the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center and the U.S. Department of Agriculture can solve the problem of vitamin A deficiency of corn-eating populations in sub-Saharan Africa and America. Nutrition lacking in retinol is a major cause of blindness.
Teams of scientists from Cornell University, the University of Illinois, the University of North Carolina and the City University of New York helped in the research published in the journal Science on Friday.
According to Science Daily, University of Illinois plant genetics professor Torbert Rocheford, author of the research's papers, maize is one of the most genetically diverse food crops. This poses a challenge to farmers looking for the varieties rich in vitamin A.
A common technique of screening the parent stock and progeny of breeding experiments is through the high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC), but conducting HPLC, which determines the provitamin A content of individual plant lines, is expensive at $50 to $75 per sample.
The new and cheaper methods are quantitative trait loci (QTL) mapping and association mapping. QTL mapping identifies regions of the corn chromosomes that influence production of vitamin A precursors.
Science Daily described association mapping as a study of variation in selected genes and the tracking of inheritance patterns to see which form of a gene coincides with the highest provitamin A content.
Association mapping led the scientists to discover a mutant enzyme responsible for producing higher levels of vitamin A precursors in corn plants. An accompanying study of 300 genetic lines of maize helped identify varieties that can yield 15 micrograms of beta-carotene, a form of provitamin A, per gram.
