Rutgers Duckweed Stock Cooperative, Resources to Enhance Research and Education for a Versatile Model Plant Family

This project supports the expansion of the Rutgers Duckweed Stock Cooperative (RDSC). Duckweeds (aka Water Lentils) are the smallest of flowering plants and is well known for their fast growth, high nutrition value and adaptability. The versatility of these plants made them attractive as a new generation of crops that promises to deliver high yield, improved quality, and scalability to enhance agricultural output and resilience to environmental factors. Since its establishment at Rutgers University in 2009, the Rutgers Duckweed Stock Cooperative (RDSC) has served U.S. and international researchers by providing a publicly accessible duckweed collection that comprises all recognized species of this family. This project will improve and expand the offerings of the RDSC for duckweed-related tools and reagents for research and education, which are critical for this rapidly growing community to tap the enormous potential of these small plants. The success of these activities will in turn support a path to long-term sustainability for the RDSC and improve the competitiveness of the U.S. in this novel crop that are now being studied all over the world. This project will enhance the information content on the RDSC website as well as to digitize metadata related to the individual duckweed clones such as their relative growth rates and other physiological properties of interest quantified through systematic screens, as well as those reported by the rapidly growing list of duckweed-related publications. New services and resources will also be offered such as DNA barcoding to assist general users in both academic and commercial sectors to identify duckweed species, and the use of dormant duckweed turions (Duckweed Pods®) as a convenient educational tool in the classroom. We anticipate these resources will help accelerate advances by the community in using the duckweed model system for diverse areas of basic and applied research, ranging from evolution to plant-microbe interaction, and for experience-based educational modules in plant biology. Better understanding of duckweed biology, as well as their natural variance in diverse traits, will help drive the rapid development of these unique plants into novel crops for sustainable farming. This project aligns with the NSF’s biotechnology priority area. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.