Geneticist in heyday of major breakthroughs

NORMAL, Ill. — John Sedbrook grew up on a small farm in southern Wisconsin that set the foundation for his later interest in plant genetics.

His dad was a high school ag teacher and the family had a small “hobby” farm.

“I did a lot of baling hay and helped my neighbors milk cows. We raised pigs ourselves. I’ve always liked nature and fast-forward I found that research was really interesting and could actually make some differences in the world,” said Sedbrook, Illinois State University’s School of Biological Sciences professor of genetics.

He received his bachelor’s degree in geology but then altered his path.

“Geology is a great field, too, like all types of sciences, but I was more interested in economic geology — mining — but I didn’t like the idea of going into pristine areas with bulldozers and then ruining nice areas,” Sedbrook noted.

“At that time, I learned about biology and things you could do genetically in improving organisms for human use.”

Sedbrook shifted his collegiate work, earning a doctorate in genetics at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, followed by postdoctoral studies at Stanford University in California.

“My area is translational research. So, I start with what’s known already about plant genetics and how we can improve different plants or crops for human uses. I am a plant molecular geneticist and we are developing new crops, domesticating them,” he said.

From Weed To Cash

His work includes the development of a new cash crop for farmers.

“We started working with pennycress in 2012 where we literally started working with it as a weed and through genetic changes have domesticated it to what is now a variety called CoverCress,” Sedbrook noted.

“We’re working with a company in St. Louis, CoverCress Inc. They’ve had I think their second commercial planting in central and southern Illinois. That’s going well, but we are looking to develop other crops at enough value to elevate them from being essentially throw-away cover crops.

“Obviously, cover crops have value for ecosystem services, but farmers can’t make money with them. So, we want to improve, for example, the forage to be high enough quality to use for animal feed and have that harvested for silage.”

Led by Sedbrook and his student researchers, pennycress was genetically modified as part of a project known as Integrated Pennycress Research Enabling Farm and Energy Resilience, resulting in the new CoverCress cover crop.

IPREFER includes multiple institutions across several Midwestern states funded by grants from the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Department of Energy over five years, 2019-2024.

Partner institutions, in addition to ISU, include Western Illinois University; University of Minnesota; Ohio State University; Southern Illinois University Carbondale; University of Wisconsin-Platteville; CoverCress Inc.; and Agricultural Utilization Research Institute, an ag-related nonprofit based in Minnesota.

A main objective of the project is to create and deploy “a suite of agronomic management projects across the region that will result in pennycress being incorporated into the predominant corn and soybean rotation and in a range of high-valued rotational crops.”

Besides domesticating pennycress, Sedbrook’s lab at ISU also focuses on understanding and manipulating secondary cell wall formation in grasses to improve biomass deconstruction properties for biofuels generation without compromising plant health.

The bioenergy crop feedstock development is a collaboration with researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Michigan State University, and at labs located around the world, as part of the U.S. Department of Energy-funded Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center.

Genetic Advancements

Sedbrook has seen first-hand the notable changes in genetic capabilities over his career, including DNA sequencing.

“When I did by Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, in the basement was the first large genome sequencing project to sequence E. coli,” he said.

“E. coli is bacteria. It’s kind of like the lab rat for bacteria. Thinking back to those days, they had row upon row of these polyacrylamide gels. That’s how they did the sequencing by basically having a electric charge that made the DNA move through the gel and then they could cull the different sequences that way.

“That was in the 1990s and now fast-forward in a relatively short period of time, you can sequence human genomes in a couple hours for $1,000 or whatever and back then it took years just to sequence that small organism.

“I feel very fortunate. We’re in the heyday right now.

“A major breakthrough was the CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats) gene editing.

“The traditional way to make genetic changes is breeding, which takes from years to decades, and then a chemical mutagenesis. This chemical called EMS (ethyl methanesulfonate) was used to add genetic variation, but it’s like taking a shotgun and it really messes up different genes. So, you might have your genetic change that’s beneficial, but then you have all these other changes that are not. It takes a long time, many generations of what’s called backcrossing — genetic crosses to clean that up.

“On the other hand, CRISPR is very precise where you can make the exact change you want to make and it’s very rapid, safe, and clean in terms of having genetic changes that are exactly what you’re looking to make. That’s been game-changing. Without that, we wouldn’t have been able to make pennycress into a crop in 10 years time.”

Teaching Rewards

Sedbrook said one of his favorites aspects of teaching is seeing students excited and interested in class.

“They’re learning some things for the first time and it gets you invigorated, too, because you can see the excitement in their eyes. I’m passionate about what I do because what we do can make real differences in the world,” he noted.

“The world has a lot of problems,” he said. “ And we need to have scientific solutions for them.

“I’m really excited that we’re in the heyday of being able to come up with solutions through agriculture that can benefit the world.

“My dream or vision would be to bring the family farms back, which is difficult to do, especially in Illinois because economy is a scale. It’s hard to have a small farm. So, to do that we’ll have to diversify agriculture. There’s tremendous amount of value, bringing back family farms and farm communities. When will we get there? I think it’s a matter of time.”