This morning, Jan. 25, BioDiagnostics, as part of the American Seed Trade Association’s 2015 Vegetable & Flower Seed Conference, hosted a “Genomic Tools in Vegetable Breeding” workshop.
Speakers included Jan Van Den Berg of Bayer CropScience, Nunhems Netherland; John (Jay) Scott of the University of Florida; Carl Braun of Monsanto; and Farhad Ghavami of BioDiagnostics. Additionally, Denise Thiede of BioDiagnostics facilitated the workshop.
Participants learned about the next generation of vegetable breeding, Scott’s experience in developing and using molecular markers in tomato breeding, the application of new breeding technologies for vegetable cultivar improvement and vegetable breeding in the genomics era.
Below are a few excerpts from the workshop:
- “I believe bioinformatics and gene mapping are really going to help us, especially with genomic selection of enriched varieties. With genome sequencing, there has been a data explosion.” — Jan Van Den Berg, Bayer CropScience
- “Growers spend a lot of money trying to control bacterial spot [on tomatoes]. I’ve worked on this for 33 years now and still have no resistant varieties. The pathogens are ever-changing.” — John (Jay) Scott, University of Florida
- “New technology — one view is that it’s very powerful and another view is that it’s unproven and dangerous. How do you balance how this gets played out in society? Maybe it’s our responsibility to have better interactions with consumers … it’s about trust.” — Carl Braun, Monsanto
- “Plant breeding is not only an art, but a system of engineering. Breeding is a multidisciplinary project with genomics, statistics, bioinformatics, agronomy and physiology. You need a team of people.” —Farhad Ghavami, BioDiagnostics, Inc.
