A Note from the Director

Hello IPBGG Members and Friends, 

Through another year of the pandemic, we have learned to adopt behaviors that protect ourselves and others, while continuing to make amazing progress in research. Teaching and learning through formal courses and meetings have continued largely uninterrupted, often with the option of a hybrid format that accommodates those who are unable to attend in person. Becoming more comfortable with a virtual world has been as asset for those of us on remote campuses, lessening our travel time and making additional courses accessible to our students. Nevertheless, we have missed the face-to-face interaction that is essential to effective networking among our now 46 faculty members (regular, adjunct, affiliate, and emeritus) and 50 students! I hope to see us return to an in-person annual retreat at Jekyll Island Villas by the Sea in May, 2022.  

While the annual retreat in 2021 was again a virtual one, it was well attended with over 80 participants for the opening session! We had an excellent program organized by Wayne Parrott and Zenglu Li with speakers from various research sectors including Pairwise Plants (Tom Adams, genome editing of fruits and vegetables), Bayer CropScience (Jennifer Yates, precision breeding of wheat), Cornell (Susan Brown, apple breeding), University of Florida (Vance Whitaker, strawberry breeding), HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology (Josh Clevenger, genotyping crops with complex genomes), and UGA (Alex Bucksch, automated phenotyping). Our own John Ingle awardees from 2020, Pheonah Nabukalu, Alexandra Ostezan, and Renan Souza, also presented the results of their research. A “lightening” poster session was organized by Soraya Bertioli and gave a glimpse of the spectacular research being conducted by our students. Full posters could be viewed online and a competition awarded prizes for MS, PhD and staff/postdoc categories.   

While this annual newsletter summarizes major activities for the prior year, the IPBGG website is regularly updated with the most current news. We also connect through LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. One feature added to the website in 2021 is Alum of the Month. I invite you to take a look if you are curious about the career paths of our former students. We added 11 graduates to our alumni group in 2021!

With the availability of a Covid vaccine and a dip in incidence at the time, we were fortunate to be able to hold the Plant Breeding Practicum class in the summer of 2021. As one of our required courses for all PBGG students, students interact with faculty from multiple breeding programs to gain knowledge of how the theory of plant breeding is put into practice.

Students in UGA’s PBGG program have the advantage of learning about a diverse set of crops, including fruits, nuts, cucurbits, forage and turf, peanut, soybean, cotton, and corn among others. Breeding practices applied vary with mating system and desired traits, thus the diversity of crops translates to a diversity of knowledge that can be gained through the practicum course, along with the added benefit to sample the fruits of labor!

Dr. Peggy Ozias-Akins
Director, Institute of Plant Breeding, Genetics & Genomics