Steven Cannon Transcript
(8:20)

My name is Steven Cannon. I work with USDA Agricultural Research Service. My work is with a group of ARS researchers who are managing genomic data for soybean. 

How did I get into this field and into ARS? I kind of have an unusual background in that I went back to school after a career in a different industry. I was working as a software designer and I went back to school in the year 2000 really interested in two things--both computers and software and plants. So I hoped to marry those two interests. 

The reason I decided to go back to school in plant biology is that my grandfather was a plant biologist with USDA and I remember him showing me around his garden we grafted fruit trees together, we looked at plant diseases and I thought that the work that he was doing was fascinating. I've always had a love of plant but I also do love computers and the work that I'm doing now allows me to really marry those two interests.

So in the last 10 years, we have gone from having no genome sequences to half a dozen. The first of those that was well sequenced was soybean. That's a sequence that is about a third as big as the human genome so that was a very large project. It has about 50,000 genes in it and each of those genes is responsible for doing things that are important to the plant and ultimately to us. Besides soybean, we've worked on common bean and some model plants that are used by scientists to understand how this group of plants behaves, pigeon pea which is important in India, and chickpea and more are on the way. 

Why I think this is important, is that these are the foods that we actually eat. If you are looking at something like chickpea, which is an important food in the U.S., it's also critically important in a lot of countries like India and we have an export market to a lot of those countries so some of these crops go to, for animal feed, some are for direct consumption, some are for industrial uses, some are for export markets and all together they are a large portion of our country's economy. 

Understanding soybean and the information in the chromosomes of soybean is really important. Traditionally, breeders have simply taken lines that they like and have crossed them, selected the best offspring of those crosses and that has worked. But we need to make much faster progress in crop improvement and the best way of doing that is by knowing where important traits and genes reside so that will help plant breeders make better crosses and selections and make much faster progress. 

It's not just important for soybeans but there is a group of about two dozen species that are used as crops or as forage plants that are related to soybean--pea, common bean, chickpea, lentil, fava bean, etc. crops that are important both in the U.S. and globally. And whatever we learn about soybean is going to be useful in these other crops and vice versa. So, we are trying to understand not just soybean but each of the crops and help understand each in a way that each is going to inform the others and help us make faster progress for all of those species. 

There are some lesser known species that I think are especially important as we start facing climate change. There are some species that are better adapted to high temperature, like cowpea or some beans that evolved in the American Southwest like lima bean or tepary bean and I think that in order to make more climate resilient soybeans, we are going to have to understand these other species. 

Why is it important to understand the whole genome? We can't actually find all of the genes until we've sequenced the whole thing and we also don't know what's important until we've actually done the sequencing. 

Also, by sequencing the whole genome and the whole genome of related crops we can make comparisons between those crop species and find which regions correspond and find traits and genes that may be useful in multiple crop species. 

Well, who is making use of this research? This and related research, that is research in plant biology done by USDA, the primary target is really ultimately farmers and from farmers to consumers. 

So, how does this benefit a farmer? Well there are enormous crop losses that farmers see each year due to pests and nutritional problems, cold temperatures or drought and so the genetic changes that we try to help breeders make are to give better seed to farmers. So, ultimately we are trying to reduce the amount of crop loss to pests and other non-biological factors like soil conditions. 

Besides U.S. farmers, the work also has a global impact because of course you find farmers in every country and crops that ARS works on really also works toward global food security and global stability. If people are hungry in India or in Africa, you have political instability so we want to both help those people and help all of the countries to be more stable. 

What I'd like to accomplish in the future with ARS is much like what I am doing now but I'd like to continue it especially in some other crop species. There are about two dozen crop species in the legume plant family. A lot of these species are very important globally not used so much in the U.S. so I'd like to be able to take what we've learned in soybean and start applying it to some other species and vice versa.