October 7, 2016
K-State researchers publish study on genomic prediction strategy in Nature Plants
Four scientists from K-State were members of a team that authored "Genomic prediction contributing to a promising global strategy to turbocharge gene banks," published in the Oct. 3 issue of Nature Plants, a member of the Nature family of scientific journals.
Team members from K-State include Donghai Wang, professor of biological and agricultural engineering; Tesfaye Tesso, associate professor of agronomy; Yuye Wu, research assistant in biology; and Kraig Roozeboom, associate professor of agronomy. Roozeboom took over as K-State principal investigator from Jianming Yu, former associate professor of agronomy at K-State, now the Pioneer Distinguished Chair in Maize Breeding at Iowa State University and overall leader of the project.
The study described in this paper was a cooperative effort of 14 authors from K-State, Iowa State University, Cornell University, the University of Minnesota and the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Agricultural Research Service.
The paper describes a cost-effective strategy of utilizing genomic and analytic technologies to assess the vast amount of valuable germplasm archived in 1,750 gene banks worldwide. Currently, the 7.4 million plant accessions in these gene banks are largely underutilized due to various resource constraints.