The bioinformatics company Illumina has donated a $1 million state-of the-art DNA sequencer to a global plant-breeding effort to fight malnutrition and poverty in Africa by improving the continent’s traditional crops. The UC Davis Plant Breeding Academy is partnering with the African Orphan Crop Consortium, which is working to map and make public the genomes…
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“Diverse Crops – Diverse Challenges” is the theme of the annual meeting of the National Association of Plant Breeders, being held at UC Davis, August 7–10, 2017. The meeting is hosted by the Plant Breeding Center, Department of Plant Sciences, UC Davis. The 360 attendees from across the U.S., along with some international visitors, were…
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Apricots offer farmers in southern Tajikistan a profitable opportunity — particularly when dried for export to foreign markets. The Horticulture Innovation Lab, led by the University of California, Davis, is supporting a new research project that focuses on improving postharvest practices for dried apricots. In a region where 10 percent of the population lives on…
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Planted in a corner of the UC Davis campus is a display of technologies and vegetable crops that researchers with the Horticulture Innovation Lab have been using with farmers in Africa, Asia and Central America. Led by UC ANR’s Elizabeth Mitcham in the UC Davis Department of Plant Sciences, this program harnesses the agricultural expertise…
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Elizabeth Mitcham (Plant Sciences) and Kurt Kornbluth (Biological and Agricultural Engineering) are the recipients of UC Davis’ inaugural Chancellor’s International Engagement Achievement Awards, while Alan Bennett (Plant Sciences) received an honorable mention. Interim Chancellor Ralph Hexter, who presented the awards, said, “Our tendency to form strong global connections and think beyond borders is one of…
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The new California Farm Demonstration Network was formally launched in an MOU signing in May at Russ Lester’s orchard in Winters, California. The network is a partnership of several groups including the California Farm Bureau Federation, the USDA NRCS, the California Assn. of Resource Conservation Districts, the California Dept. of Food and Agriculture, UC ANR,…
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Campus recently launched the UC Davis Women in STEM web page, https://www.ucdavis.edu/women-stem. The page includes profiles, videos, resources, and news about campus initiatives and efforts to recruit, support, and advance women in STEM fields. People across campus are welcome to share the content, as appropriate, with their key audiences. You can link to the page…
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A federal jury has ruled in favor of the University of California in its lawsuit with two former UC Davis strawberry breeders and the private breeding company they created with UC-owned plants. A separate jury is expected to decide issues related to damages at a later time. The jurors unanimously decided that Douglas Shaw and…
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Two professors in the Department of Plant Sciences at UC Davis have been awarded fellowships for the Faculty Fellowship Summer Institute in Israel. Maeli Melotto, an expert in plant-microbe interactions, and Diane Beckles, an expert in postharvest biochemistry and molecular physiology, are among 26 faculty across the U.S. who received the competitive academic fellowship. The…
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Georgia Drakakaki from the University of California, Davis, was awarded a fellowship by The Greek Diaspora Fellowship Program to travel to Greece to work on “Chemical genomics research, training and education in plant growth and productivity” in collaboration with Prof. Polydefkis Hatzopoulos at the Agricultural University of Athens. Drakakaki, an associate professor in the Department…
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