Genetic analysis by a team led by Travis Parker points to beans’ earliest domestication in Jalisco, Mexico, and confirms a new site of proto-domestication in the northern Andes of South America. The work offers a roadmap for breeders to understand the traits they seek to improve modern bean crops.
Jorge Dubcovsky, distinguished professor in the Department of Plant Sciences at the University of California, Davis, has been named the 2026 World Agriculture Prize Laureate.
Ashley Pearce is trying to help rice farmers decrease fertilizer or increase yield by testing different levels of nitrogen on different varieties in different conditions.
Astrid Volder and Rachel Noon are collecting all kinds of data from both young and mature almond rootstocks to build a model for below-ground management. Their work is getting international attention.
Randi Famula, lab manager of the UC Davis Strawberry Breeding Program, earned campus-wide recognition for her high standards in running the facility overseen by breeding program Director Mitchell Feldmann.
Nazmin Akter is testing lower night-time temperatures to harden tomato seedlings ahead of transplanting them into farm fields. She's a Ph.D. student in Laura Cammarisano's Controlled Environment Agriculture Lab.
Maeli Melotto attended a United Nations event in China charting a framework for sustainable agri-food systems. Her work on pathogen-resistant lettuce and its soil microbiome won two USDA grants of nearly $1.5 million.
Doctoral student Marco Castaneda Martinez won the inaugural Betsey Landis Award from the California Native Plant Society, including a $1,500 grant, for research on purple needlegrass, California's state grass.
Students in the Brummer and Potter labs are looking at plant genetics and wild relatives to find and develop alfalfa cultivars that produce even when water is scarce and increase overall yield.
