|
 As the field technician for the Buckler group, it’s my responsibility to keep the field nurseries running smoothly and the returning seed in some semblance of order. Over the previous several years, myself and other members of the group have traveled to nursery locations of our collaborators to measure phenotypic traits on the RILs and NILs in the ongoing NSF study. I briefly helped Nengyi Zhang, a post-doc in our lab, with setting up a pilot project in a greenhouse setting looking into the role and function of Nitrogen Reductase, an enzyme in the assimilation pathway. Nengyi expanded this project and traveled to Germany with samples collected from our field site in Aurora,NY. While there he measured 12 nitrogen and carbon metabolites on the NAM panel, IBM, and the association panel. If able to gain a better understanding of the genes involved in these pathways and where they reside, marker-assisted breeding could speed up the introduction of varieties that could help reduce the need for costly and environmentally damaging Nitrogen fertilizers on heavy Nitrogen feeding crops such as maize. Check out Nengyi's page.  Myself, and other members of the group are working on a method to measure phenotypic traits aerially with the idea of doing so in a fast and accurate manner. We briefly used a camera equipped with a NIR filter, attached to a helium balloon. I won't mention how that turned out. Using aerial images in a setup with a camera and filter or something similar that captures the absorbtion and reflection of specific spectrums can provide the means to calculate a Normalized Difference Vegetative Index (NDVI), whereby plant 'health' can be measured. In corn, most nitrogen is bound by the chlorophyll, a substance easily quantified by a set of wavelengths in the visible and near-infrared portions of the spectrum. We also hope to be able to accurately measure other phenotypic traits. Below are aerial pictures taken of the Aurora farm. The one on the left demonstrates the diversity in soil types in our maize plots.   A side project that I'm working on is trying to use NAM and now our incoming NILs to map fall armyworm(Spodoptera frugiperda) insect resistance. Data was taken in a winter field seasons in Puerto Rico on 11 NAM populations. QTLs were found on chromosomes 2,3, and 6 in respect to leaf-feeding damage... Below are pictures of the fall armyorm from this season's winter field season.   Another side project involves herbicide resistance. Our NAM nursery received a pre-emergent application of an auxin-type growth regulator in Benzoic acid family this past Spring (Banvel) Two populations showed varying degrees of susceptibility and it is my intention to detect QTLs that may be surrounding this issue of resistance, and later fine map the underlying regions. Below is a picture of the resulting herbicide damage.  One more project that I briefly helped with this past summer was with another grad student, Allison Krill. She was able to get a grant funded, in conjunction with The Rodale Institute, looking into the impact of cropping systems on varieties by utilizing the hybrids derived from the NAM founders. The Field Systems Trial (FST) at Rodale is the longest-running organic farm systems trial in the U.S. Below are a couple of pictures of some insect pests from the trial.  
|
