UD RESEARCHERS INCLUDING SHAWN POLSON work to predict disease resistance in lima beans

When downy mildew epidemics strike, they are a plague to lima bean growers in Delaware, which produces over 60 percent of the nation’s crop for canning and freezing.

Using a technique called genotyping-by-sequencing (GBS), the UD researchers were able to find molecular markers that identified possible disease resistance. This technique, as well as the utilization of a bioinformatics pipeline known as Reduced Representation (REDREP) was used to analyze the data was developed at the Delaware Biotechnology Institute (DBI) by Shawn Polson, director of the bioinformatics core in the Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology and associate professor in the departments of Computer and Information Sciences and Biological Sciences, Wisser and Keith Hopper, an affiliated associate professor in the Department of Entomology and Wildlife Ecology.

Article courtesy of UDaily, June 26, 2017