2010 Drought Tolerance Center of Excellence

South Dakota State University

college of agriculture & biological sciences

Drought Tolerance Center of Excellence

The Seed Technology Building and Drought Center will provide the base facilities and lab space required for the core faculty and programs. This facility will provide the laboratory space required to scale up research efforts in plant genomics by experiment station scientists.

On April 24, 2009 ground was broken for the Seed Technology Laboratory at the South Dakota State University Innovation Campus. Follow the construction progress here.

Focus and Goals:

Development of the nation’s premier research center on applied crop biotechnology with an emphasis on drought stress and adaptation.

The goals of the Drought Tolerance Center of Excellence:

· to identify the genes associated with drought, temperature and other environmental stressors

· to develop specific genome based solutions to ameliorate the effects of these stressors on key agronomic crops

· to develop public private partnerships to commercialize these technologies, making them available to producers in South Dakota and other states

Center activities (2003-Today)

· Infrastructure Development

· Integration with academic and research programs

· Collaborations

· Interaction with economic development

· Genomics faculty