The February 2010 CVIDS meeting will take place on Saturday,
February 20, at the Coralville Public Library, beginning at 1 PM.
Jonathan Poulton will present a program on "Creation of Blue Daylilies by Genetic Engineering". As is our tradition, the meeting room has been reserved from noon, so come early and mingle with fellow members. If you would like to contribute to the refreshments, please bring along a favorite dish to share.

Our meeting will take place in Meeting Rooms A/B. You may remember from previous visits that this large room is downstairs. If you prefer not to negotiate the stairs to the basement, you may park your car in the Lower Level (look for signs, after you enter the parking lot) and come into the building through the garage door. Have a safe journey to Coralville!

Program: "Creation of Blue Daylilies by Genetic Engineering".
The 65,000 named daylily cultivars currently listed in the American Hemerocallis Society database exhibit a dazzling range of colors, including violet, yellow, orange, purple, and red, but no true blue daylily has yet been recorded.  This suggests that these lines lack the inherent capacity to form significant quantities of blue pigments.  Furthermore, it raises the question whether true blue daylilies could ever be obtained by conventional hybridization. 

During Fall Semester 2009, Jonathan Poulton, in collaboration
with twelve students in his Honors Seminar in Biology course at
the University of Iowa, undertook a literature search to investigate whether true blue daylilies might be generated by genetic engineering using methods that have in recent years proven remarkably successful for producing violet-hued carnations (Fukui
et al., 2003) and blue roses (Katsumoto et al., 2007).  In his presentation, Jonathan will identify the pigments that accumulate in blue-flowered species such as delphiniums, irises, gentians, and Torenia and outline the biochemical pathway by which these compounds are made.  To generate blue daylilies by genetic engineering, genes catalyzing key pathway steps must be isolated from delphiniums and other blue-flowered species and introduced into daylilies in such a way that they remain fully functional.  Review of the literature shows that most if not all of the individual steps of this process have already been carried out.  It now remains for someone to undertake the complete succession of experiments and determine whether theory is borne out in practice!

The above photo shows the parental rose cultivar Lavande (left) and
two genetically engineered lines derived from Lavande (center, right). (Katsumoto et al., Plant & Cell Physiology (2007) 48: 1589-1600).