Muscadine grapes (Vitis rotundifolia) are one of the South’s sweetest natural treasures—famous for their rich, “candy-like” flavor and incredible ability to thrive in heat and humidity. Native from coastal Virginia through Florida and west to eastern Texas, muscadines flourish where summer is intense and winters stay above 10° F.
Muscadines are beloved for their natural strengths: outstanding disease resistance, remarkable insect tolerance, and unmatched adaptation to the southern climate.
Southern stem canker is one of the most destructive diseases of soybean, capable of stripping away between 20 and 80 percent of yield depending on how susceptible a cultivar is and how favorable the environment is for the pathogen. Over the past two decades alone, the disease has caused an estimated 226 million dollars in economic losses across the southern United States soybean production region.
Researchers at the University of Georgia, led by M. Habib Widyawan together with James W. Buck and Zenglu Li, set out to answer a deceptively simple question: do two well-known resistant soybean lines, the cultivar Crockett and the plant introduction PI 398469, carry the same resistance allele at Rdm3 or two different ones?
Modern tomatoes often sacrifice flavor for traits like yield, shelf life and disease resistance. But now, an international team of researchers, including University of Georgia plant geneticist Esther van der Knaap, has uncovered new clues about how that flavor was lost during tomato domestication and breeding, and identified genetic tools that could help breeders bring it back.