A research team from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln’s Schnable Lab received The Plant Journal’s 2024 Outstanding Original Research Article Award. Their paper was chosen from about 500 published articles.
The study focused on corn genetics, where less than 2% of corn genes had previously been linked to specific plant traits. Led by James Schnable and Vladimir Torres Rodriguez, the team examined whether analyzing RNA differences could help identify gene functions more effectively than DNA analysis.
Their method assigned functions to ten times as many genes as traditional DNA-based approaches. The team developed a high-speed sampling workflow to address the challenge of RNA’s rapid variability…