Students Win at Alfalfa Conference

Students in the lab of Charlie Brummer took Student Awards at a national alfalfa conference, where they presented their research.

Brummer, a professor in the UC Davis Department of Plant Sciences, also gave a presentation during the North American Alfalfa Improvement Conference. The group traveled to Stillwater, Minn., in mid-July for the event. The awards were given for the students’ poster presentations to encourage promising research.

We asked them to tell us about their winning research.

Rory Xiao 

Rory Xiao recently graduated with his bachelor’s degree in plant sciences. This fall, he’ll start as a master’s student with Brummer, in the horticulture and agronomy graduate group. 

Q: Tell us about your research.

“Breeding efforts to improve alfalfa yield have been mostly focused on pest and disease resistance, stress tolerance, fall dormancy, or selecting for yield directly. Unfortunately, selection for yield has been unsuccessful, and biomass yield has stagnated for the last four decades. 

“Biomass is a complex trait affected by many genetic and environmental factors. Using DNA markers, I am working to identify the genetic locations of architectural traits that are components of yield in diploid alfalfa. Traits including leaf size and quantity, and stem erectness, length and quantity, are what I am hoping to map.”

Xiao and team hope this information could be used by breeders to develop new varieties of alfalfa that produce more biomass and lead to further gene studies.

Q: How did you get interested in this?

“I grew up surrounded by people in computer science and engineering in the Silicon Valley area, but in school, I was always a lot more interested in the life sciences. As I took plant science classes at UC Davis, I got increasingly interested in the ag improvement field, and before I knew it, I was in the greenhouse working with Charlie's alfalfa. 

“I feel like there should be a lot more young people going into this field than there is. The challenges in the world of ag are so incredibly numerous, but that's what makes it so impactful and fulfilling.”

Gabriella Perez 

Gabriella Perez will be starting her second year as a master’s student in the horticulture and agronomy graduate group.  

Q: Tell us about your research.

“My research aims to address the decades-long yield stagnation in alfalfa by investigating ways to ‘redesign’ the crop through structural modification using genetic engineering. Partnering with the Ralph M. Parsons Foundation Plant Transformation Facility here at UC Davis, alfalfa was transformed with GROWTH-REGULATING FACTOR (GRF) and GRF-INTERACTING FACTOR (GIF) to evaluate their effects on leaf biomass and other yield-related traits.

“We hope that, through this project, we can identify candidate genes that increase yield while still maintaining forage quality.”

Q: How did you get interested in this?

“I am originally from South Florida and have always been interested in the natural world around me, particularly plants. This led me to study horticulture and agronomy, with the motivation to improve crops through genetic engineering in the face of pressing agricultural challenges.”

Michele Nalle

Michelle Nalle is a third-year doctoral student in the hort and ag graduate group.

Q: Tell us about your research.
“At the conference, I presented a research poster titled ‘Evaluating Stress Tolerance and Productivity of Non-Dormant Alfalfa Germplasm Pools.’ This project evaluates diverse, non-dormant alfalfa germplasm in field trials in Davis and in El Centro, Calif., under both full and deficit irrigation conditions. We are trying to identify populations that maintain productivity, vigor and persistence under water stress.

“The long-term goal is to support the development of resilient alfalfa cultivars that can continue performing and recover after periods of reduced irrigation, particularly in California’s Central Valley and low-desert production regions.”

Q: How did you get interested in this?
“I come from Timor, a dry island in eastern Indonesia, where limited water availability is a major challenge for agriculture and local communities. Studying plant breeding in target production environments helps me understand how to select and develop crops that are resilient under drought and other environmental stresses.”

Oluwatosin Adebanjo

Oluwatosin Adebanjo is a third-year doctoral student who is co-advised by Dan Potter, a professor and department chair. Oluwatosin presented a poster titled, “Phenological Diversity in Local Collection of Medicago Lupulina.” He also moderated the session on Genetics, Genomics and Breeding in which Brummer and others presented.

Q: Tell us about your research.

“My research investigates the geographic and ecological drivers of flowering time across a global diversity panel of Medicago lupulina (black medic), a wild-relative of alfalfa.

“Using the combination of standardized phenological data with geographic passport metadata, we classified accessions of black medic into distinct ecological biomes and utilized multivariate linear regressions to isolate photoperiodic (latitude) and topographic (elevation) drivers.We demonstrated that distinct eco-regions evolve counteracting latitudinal strategies, which mask broad macro-geographic trends. Our goal for this research is to provide critical insights to plant breeders for the development of climate-resilient and regionally adapted forage crops. 

Q: How did you get interested in this?

“I have always been fascinated by why plants of the same type or kind look either similar or different. I am investigating the variation in phenotypes of plants to unravel the genetic codes responsible.”