A lab at the University of Kentucky Martin-Gatton College of Agriculture, Food and Environment (CAFE) is at the forefront of breeding and genetics of fruits and vegetables.
The Sapkota Horticultural Breeding and Genetics Lab, located on campus and at the Horticultural Research Farm (South Farm), is led by Manoj Sapkota, Ph.D., assistant professor in horticultural crop breeding for nutrition in the Department of Horticulture. The lab’s mission is to enhance crop productivity, increase disease resistance and improve nutritional quality to meet the needs of growers, producers and consumers in Kentucky and beyond.
“We are trying to find genes and genetics that make fruits and vegetables more nutritious, increase the quality, enhance the shelf life, make fruit size bigger or smaller and disease resistant,” Sapkota said. “The big goal of the lab is developing new varieties, so growers here in Kentucky have different options that are well suited to Kentucky conditions and have all the best qualities.”
Sapkota works with a team of lab members — research staff, undergraduate and graduate students, and volunteers — on several research projects that include field-based tomato breeding and strawberry disease-resistance screening to seed morphology, herbicide resistance and computer vision-assisted phenotyping.
The student researchers who work in the lab have a range of UK majors, including agricultural and medical biotechnology, biology, computer science, data science, health sciences, horticulture and neuroscience.
Source : uky.edu