James and the Giant Corn Genetics: Studying the Source Code of Nature

January 15, 2008

About

Filed under: — James @ 12:43 am

My name is James, I’m working on I received my PhD in Plant Biology at from Berkeley. I’m an assistant professor, and the co-founder of two start ups. My academic lab works on comparative and functional genomics as well as high throughput phenotyping of maize, sorghum, and a bunch of related orphan grain crops and wild grass species.

Anything posted here is my own opinion and doesn’t reflect the views of any of my various employers, employees, advisors, advisees, minions, etc. I started this blog … well partially to keep in touch with friends and family, but mostly because it justified purchasing a web hosting space. It’s grown in fits and spurts over the years, with a focus shifting from the life of an undergraduate, to science communication, to my own research and experiences… I hope you enjoy reading, because I’ve enjoyed having the chance to write over the past almost decade now.

-James (1-12-08) (3/6/17)

::updated 1-21-09::

For those interested in learning more about me and my research, I try to keep this site up to date with links to my research presence throughout the web.

::updated 6-22-15::

Now I have an actual research group!

If you were wondering, the corn behind me in the banner is a mexican cultivar being grown in Iowa where it flowers very late in the season, leaving it a lot more time to focus on vegetative growth, getting bigger and taller. Mexican corn determines when to flower based on the length of night, a trait that modern cultivars have lost, allowing them to successful reproduce at a much wider range of latitudes.

3 Comments »

  1. Hi James, I enjoy reading your blog. Keep it up!
    Here’s a link to the interview they did on KVAL @ strawberry genome featuring some of the players from OSU and USDA in Corvallis.
    http://www.kval.com/news/business/112533799.html

    I am sending you an invite to a workshop we are hosting at PAG, hope you can attend.
    Laurel

    Comment by Laurel Cooper — December 30, 2010 @ 10:52 am

  2. “Mexican corn determines when to flower based on the length of night, a trait that modern cultivars have lost, allowing them to successful reproduce at a much wider range of latitudes.”

    Just to elaborate – modern cultivars haven’t really lost it, just the big exhibition of leaves. Less-reactive modern cultivars are commensurately geographically limited in reproduction; now they can’t reproduce in the tropics – no wider range for them but rather for the maize subspecies!

    Comment by jkarl — August 9, 2011 @ 3:22 pm

  3. Well I’ll admit to being a bit confused by this point. I was under the impression that the flowering time for many more temperate inbreds (as well as the extreme northern varieties like Flints) were determined solely by total days or “growing degree days,” so temperate lines should, in fact, successfully reproduce in the tropics (although they’d flower too soon and miss a good portion of the growing season).

    However, I haven’t done the experiments myself and I can’t seem to turn out any papers to back this idea up in a quick search tonight, so I am completely prepared to acknowledge I may have gotten this wrong.

    Comment by James — August 9, 2011 @ 4:14 pm

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