The Wisconsin Crop Innovation Center

Genome sequencing of many species and cultivars within species has provided a substrate for unprecedented exploration of biological principles and development of applied solutions in crops. The potential of this resource will be met in part by a dramatic increase in production of transgenic and gene-edited plants. As suggested in the recent Plant Cell review (Stewart Jr. et.al; The Plant Cell, Vol. 28: 1510–1520, July 2016), many new innovations and processes will be needed in order to address the current and future bottlenecks that are evident in the present-day systems. A new facility at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the Wisconsin Crop Innovation Center, has been brought online to work with researchers by providing services and through collaboration to address these challenges. WCIC will undertake research focused on improving various aspects of transformation including, tissue culture techniques, genotype independence, throughput, automation, nucleic acid and protein delivery, selection, etc. WCIC will participate in the goal of providing resources that will allow public crop researchers envision research at a new scale – utilizing hundreds to thousands of constructs for genome scale research and synthetic biology projects. While initial focus will be on crops such as maize, small grains, sorghum, soybean, and Medicago species, we are seeking initial large-scale collaborative projects in any crop species for which researchers envision need for large-scale transformation and editing projects. The poster will summarize some initial activities at WCIC and describe capabilities.