It can take as long as nine months for a farmer to discover that a banana plant grown in culture will not bloom-and up to seven years for the date palm—but a Case Western Reserve University biologist has discovered a way to monitor for abnormal plants at each step of the growing process.

Christopher Cullis, professor of biology at Case, with Samantha Rademan, who is with Amersham in South Africa, and Karl Kunert from the University of Pretoria in South Africa have received a patent, "Method for Detecting Genomic Destabilization Arising During Tissue Culture of Plant Cells," to detect malformed plants.

This patent is for the methodology of comparing normal and abnormal, or mutant, DNA from banana and date palm plants grown from cells in culture.

Crops grown rapidly in controlled conditions-like to replenish fields after a hurricane or other disaster-tend to produce malformed plants. Mutants do not occur from cuttings or sucker plants, according to Cullis. They only develop when cells from the growth region of a plant are propagated in an unorganized mass in a culture and later spurred to grow with hormones and nutrients into a plant with roots, stem and leaves.

As a plant geneticist, Cullis has found that if certain points on the DNA vary from normal DNA, the plant will be malformed. This new methodology can be applied to a single plant or to a representative sample of cells being grown into new plants.

While he has already indicated these points for the banana and date palm plants, Cullis plans to expand the DNA marker methodology crop by crop. He sees this discovery as particularly helpful for companies that reforest lands, where it might take decades before the growers realize they have sterile and mutant trees.

While the university owns the patent for Cullis' work developed while he was on sabbatical in South Africa in 1997, Cullis is the chief executive officer of NovoMark Technologies, which will license the technology. NovoMark is located in Case's Enterprise Development Inc.

Return to the online edition of the 12-18-03 Campus News.