Managing for Profit

Predicting the next big yielding hybrid

University of Illinois corn breeder Martin Bohn is using a $500,000 USDA grant on research to improve corn breeding efficiency.  It’s hoped that it will bring about the ability to predict the performance of corn hybrids.  Bohn wants to use the corn genome to make breeding faster, more efficient, and more predictive.  He tells Brownfield corn breeding is a numbers game, but that advances in knowledge about mapping the corn genome could make corn breeding more predictive.  In three years, Bohn and collaborators from the University of Illinois and the University of Minnesota hope to have a tool that will cut out much of the trial-and-error involved in traditional corn breeding, but he says it’s only the beginning.

AUDIO: Martin Bohn (3 min. MP3)

Add Comment

Your email address will not be published.


 

Stay Up to Date

Subscribe for our newsletter today and receive relevant news straight to your inbox!