Overview
Selective breeding improves plant and animal products by identifying desirable traits such as quality, yield, and ability to grow in difficult conditions, ensuring that that there is sufficient production for food, fuel and raw materials. Factors like climate change and population growth are making selective breeding more important than ever. One of the largest challenges facing the plant research community is identifying the suite of genes that make organisms well adapted to their environment and using this information in breeding programs.
Drs. Lewis Lukens, Cortland Griswold and their team are using bioinformatics tools to understand how organisms that adapt well to their environments can be selected to accelerate the development of new plant varieties.