20 GERMINATION.CA JANUARY 2019 the CucCAP’s lead researcher. The CucCAP is also helping get cucurbit disease information out to people in the wider com- munity. Angela Linares, associate director of the Department of Agro- Environmental Sciences at University of Puerto Rico, has translated a number of CucCAP fact sheets into Spanish, an effort she says will help bolster food security on the Caribbean island of 3.3 million people and elsewhere in the U.S. “The CucCAP presents a unique opportunity to reach other communi- ties, not only farmers but employees, students, or anyone else who wants to learn about cucurbits,” Linares says. The cucurbit community at large is no stranger to reaching out in order to solve problems and create improved varieties, notes Allen Van Deynze, a Canadian plant breeding researcher based at UC Davis and an organizer of Cucurbitaceae 2018. “We are a mixture of geneticists, plant breeders, pathologists, agrono- mists and so on. It’s quite an interna- tional community,” he says. “There’s a lot of potential. Cucurbits are really a young crop breeding-wise. When I grew up in Canada there were three melons you could get: watermelon, honeydew and cantaloupe. And that was it. The genetic diversity within each of these is incredible and it’s untapped. If you travel around the world, it’s like, ‘Whoa, this tastes fantastic. Why isn’t this on my shelf?’” Breeding for the Shelf Vegetable seed company HM.CLAUSE, a major sponsor of Cucurbitaceae 2018, does just that. That quest for new genetics that can be turned into new products is what excites Bill Copes, HM.CLAUSE cucurbit breeding coordinator based in Sacramento, Calif. “We spend a lot of time in the field tasting these products, looking for something that’s unique, looking for something that’s a little bit dif- ferent that might have a little higher flavour profile,” he says. Like the Bayer/Walmart collabo- ration, HM.CLAUSE has partnered to develop the Origami cantaloupe, which features improved flavour Bill Copes of HM.CLAUSE. Ben Mansfeld, student in the Grumet lab.