Postdoctoral associate Michelle Serapiglia and Ph.D. student Fred Gouker inspect hybrid willow seedlings with associate of horticulture Larry Smart.
The commercialization of shrub willow as a bioenergy crop could be years closer, thanks to a $1.37 million grant that will allow Cornell researchers to take advantage of the newly mapped shrub willow genome to study hybrid vigor and yield. Larry Smart, associate professor of horticulture, has partnered with Christopher D. Town, professor at the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI) in Rockville, Md., to study the genetics of superior growth in hybrids of shrub willow, a fast-growing, perennial cool-climate woody plant. "Determining the precise genetic mechanisms that produce hybrid vigor has been a scientific challenge for a century," said Smart. Unlocking those mechanisms and then developing simple techniques for finding the genetic fingerprint for hybrid vigor in parent species could cut the time it takes to identify promising progeny, Smart said. And time is money; for farmers to adopt a new crop like shrub willow - and for companies to accept the end product - they need assurance of long-term profitability before taking on the associated higher risk. "We think the results of this research will take years off the cycle time needed to find the best growing shrub willow hybrids and with consistent increases in yield each cycle, we will rapidly advance commercialization of this emerging bioenergy crop," Smart said. Specifically, the researchers will examine gene expression patterns in shrub willow species hybrids.
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