“The world relies on three crops for the bulk of our supplement … rice, maize and wheat,” DellaPenna said. “While plants have all the vitamins and minerals that we need, they don’t contain them at the levels that are required for recommended daily allowance.”

Through genetic research, DellaPenna helped locate a gene which would enable corn to produce more beta-carotene — akin to finding a needle in a haystack.

Scientists tested thousands of types of corn in the past several years looking for a key gene, which allows vitamin A to be accessible, among corn’s about 30,000 genes.

“A thousand crosses may be done and only 10 or 20 may end up making it,” DellaPenna said. “You start with a very big number and you whittle it down.”

The team’s final product is a serving of corn that contains about 57 percent of the vitamin A needed in a daily diet.

The lack of vitamin A in most diets, primarily in third world countries, has led to between 250,000 and 500,000 children annually going blind, DellaPenna said.

And for every child who lost their vision, 1,000 more have a vitamin A deficiency.

“Vitamin A is required for the immune system to function properly, for development, not just for eyesight,” DellaPenna said.

“You get diseases, you get colds, you get everything made much worse.”

DellaPenna estimates that the vitamin A-enhanced corn should be on the market in the next three to four years.

Some collaborators in the projects already have introduced the unique variant of the gene in corn breeding programs, and a shipment of seeds including those of the genetically modified corn is set to reach the African country of Zambia in 2012 or 2013, said Torbert Rocheford, a professor at Purdue University and the project’s lead coordinator.

Rocheford said he began researching the relationship between vitamin A and corn in the mid-1990s.

“I wanted it for two reasons,” Rocheford said of his research. “For the health, and also it would be a nice model system for studying quantitate variation.”

The research team chose to enhance vitamin A because the nutrient was one of the best understood, but DellaPenna said the future plan for the group is to produce corn containing high amounts of other vitamins in addition to an increased amount of vitamin A.

“The long-term goal is to produce plants that essentially give you all of the micro nutrients that you need in your diet,” DellaPenna said.

Tom Sharkey, chairman of the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, said DellaPenna’s work could have an important impact on those who don’t take in enough vitamin A.

“Looking at how people get the nutrients they need is something that is researched quite a bit by many people,” Sharkey said. “Dean DellaPenna is one of the leaders in this area.”