Beth Rowan

My research spans a wide range of interests with a common theme of understanding how to manipulate plant genes and genomes to achieve desired traits. Aspects of our program involve combining genomes in a hybrid, directly editing one or more genes to determine if they cause a specific trait, making changes to genes that modify the rates of genetic reshuffling via meiotic recombination, or applications of plant tissue culture. We also employ high-throughput sequencing and computational analysis to investigate the genetic basis of traits to inform our engineering targets. With one foot in the hypothesis-driven basic science research and the other in applied biotechnology and engineering, I aim to generate practical knowledge that will enable us to make climate-resilient horticultural crops.