Bearded man in blue coat and gloves holds a slender tool against the center of yellow-and-white flowers in a greenhouse. UC Davis Department of Plant Sciences — In a greenhouse on the UC Davis campus, Imtiyaz Khanday pollinates potato flowers as part of his project to develop true potato seeds that preserve the beneficial traits of the parent plants from generation to generation. Such seeds would be a boon for small farmers around the world growing this important food crop. (UC Davis)

Khanday wins UCOP Excellence Award for early career scientists

Aim: Clonal seed for potato

by Cody Kitaura
July 15, 2026

Imtiyaz Khanday is one of six people at UC Davis who received the Early Career Faculty Research Excellence Award, granted along with a $50,000 prize by the University of California Office of the President.

Khanday is an assistant professor in the Department of Plant Sciences, with a focus on the basic biological processes of seed development.

This is the first year of the UCOP Early Career Faculty Research Excellence Awards, which seek to advance the university’s commitment to the scholarship and creative activity of early career faculty across all 10 UC campuses. Nominations were submitted by deans.

More efficient potato propagation

Through his research, Khanday integrates plant reproductive biology, gene editing, and seed science to develop clonal seed technologies, improve seed vigor, and enhance crop resilience under a changing climate. Clonal seeds offer many advantages, especially for small farmers who can’t afford to buy hybrid seed every year

Khanday was part of the research team that developed rice plants capable of reproducing clonally through seed. Khanday now is working to extend this technology to potatoes. A breakthrough here eventually could enable growers to use small, disease-free botanical seeds instead of bulky seed tubers, which are expensive to produce, transport and store, and can carry disease.

The project uses gene editing to develop synthetic apomixis, a process that allows plants to produce clonal seeds without genetic reshuffling through sexual reproduction. In potato, this approach could allow true potato seeds, or TPS, to faithfully preserve elite genotypes while enabling disease-free, seed-based propagation.

“Potato is the world’s most important tuber crop and ranks fourth globally in human caloric intake,” Khanday wrote. “Propagation of potatoes through clonal TPS could revolutionize potato cultivation.”

His project is titled, “Engineering Synthetic Apomixis for Clonal Seed Propagation in Potato.”

Khanday joined UC Davis in 2014 as a postdoctoral scholar, then worked as an assistant project scientist at the university before becoming an assistant professor in 2021.

Read here to learn more about clonal seed technology and the project in rice.