News | Comai Lab

Bioinformatics Workshop

by Bangkok, Thailand
December 14, 2023

Luca Comai taught a bioinformatics workshop on Python-empowered genomic exploration.

What is the outlook for potato inbreeding and true seed propagation?

Luca Comai wrote this perspective review of progress in inbreeding potato.

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Isabelle Henry in a Black Mitcham peppermint field. Henry is a researcher at UC-Davis focused on finding higher resilience to verticillium wilt, which plagues peppermint plants.

Can researchers save the Pacific Northwest mint industry?

by Berit Thornson, Capital Press
September 07, 2023

Outreach

In this article, Berit Thorson from Capital Press summarizes the challenges faced by the mint industry and highlights the efforts undertaken in our laboratory to help develop new mint clones. This work is supported by the Mint Industry Research Council (MIRC).

Figure 2. How do we make uniform fruit and vegetables? The genetics of crop plants and pets are not that different. In both cases, pure bred varieties have a genome with high homozygosity, which results in uniform progeny while F2 hybrids make progeny with variable characteristics.

How Can We Breed Desirable Plants Faster?

by Victoria Stewart, Livingstone M. Nganga, Isabelle M. Henry, Luca Comai
September 06, 2023

In this article targeted for high school students, we learn about the challenges of breeding new crop varieties and how haploid induction can help speed up this process. This article was published in the context of an NSF-PRGP award (PGRP IOS-2055260 “Mechanisms of haploid induction in potato”).

Flower Power: A Close Look at Plant Reproduction

by Katherine E Dalhausen, David Coil, Luca Comai, Isabelle Henry
February 21, 2023

In this article from Frontiers (2020) geared towards middle-school students, we introduce the different kinds of sexual systems in plants, their advantages and disadvantages, how scientists can learn more about them, and why it is important to understand how they work.

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