Research

Polyploidy
We study polyploidy in mints, potato and any other convenient plant species.

Poplar Indels
Perennial, clonally propagated plants provide a challenge and an opportunity for functional gene discovery. Meiotic recombination-based genetic analysis and breeding are hampered by the long generation cycle. On the other hand, clonal propagation enables the production of many individuals with identical…

Potato
A common plant breeding procedure involves moving valuable traits, such as disease resistance, from wild relatives to crop varieties. To achieve this, breeders cross a wild variety to a crop variety. The result is called a hybrid, and it mixes genes from both parents. Most of the genes from the wild variety, however..

Centromeres
Following a close collaboration with the Chan lab and the demise of Simon Chan in the Summer of 2012, we have assimilated Chan lab researchers working on different aspects of centromeric function and its epigenetic determination…

Mint
We are characterizing the genome of mints to understand how polyploid spearmint and peppermint were formed. We are using genomic insight, TILLING, and hybridization to breed new mints.

Sex Chromosomes
Coming Soon…