Presenter: Kyle Benzle, PhD student, Horticulture and Crop Science, Dr. Katrina Cornish’s Lab
Title: Development of a ploidy reduction system for outcrossing plants through manipulating the centromere: lessons from a non-model organism
Abstract: It is very desirable that knowledge developed in model organisms is translated to be applied in non-model organisms such as crops. However, in many cases, the translation process is inexistent or poorly developed, which limits the applications on commercially relevant organisms. In this presentation, we share the lessons learned from an attempt of deploying a strategy to generate genetically homozygous individuals and progenies of cross-pollinated plant species, which by nature are restricted to produce heterogeneous progenies only. The strategy based on manipulating a gene influencing the structure of the chromosomes was originally developed in the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana, and we tried to translate and implement this strategy in other plant species in order to make more efficient breeding or to accelerate domestication.
