Cornell Chronicle article by Amanda Garris details three projects funded by the USDA’s Agriculture and Food Research Initiative (AFRI):
- A $410,000 AFRI grant will allow Kenong Xu, an assistant professor of horticulture at Cornell’s New York State Agricultural Experiment Station in Geneva, to analyze the function of the likely gatekeeper of apple acidity, a gene called Ma1. The research was prompted by Cornell apple breeder Susan Brown, Cornell horticulture professor Lailiang Chang and Miguel Piñeros, a research plant physiologist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service are both co-leads on the project.
- A $500,000 AFRI grant will allow breeder Martha Mutschler-Chu to deepen her understanding of different types of acylsugars – sugars produced and exuded from hairs (trichomes) that cover wild Peruvian tomato plants – and how they might impact insects in different ways. That, in turn, could lead to developing additional lines of tomatoes with targeted resistance to specific pests, which would substantially reduce pesticide usage and tomato production costs.
- A $450,000 AFRI grant will allow Michael Mazourek , the Calvin Noyes Keeney Assistant Professor of Plant Breeding, to create varieties of squash with high levels of carotenoids and carbohydrates. Using transcriptome sequencing, metabolite analysis and a unique barcoding and phenotyping system developed in his lab, Mazourek will determine the genetic basis of variation in fruit quality of three types of squash and a pumpkin.