Team Leader: Jason Londo, Research Geneticist, USDA-ARS GGRU
630 W. North St., Geneva, NY 14456
Jason.Londo@ars.usda.gov
Jason manages all the different aspects of genetics in this huge project. He oversees the use of amplicon sequencing to develop new markers, genome sequencing to discover new markers, and gene expression to learn how traits are controlled. All of this work is to put more tools in the hands of grapevine breeders so they can reduce the cost and time needed to release new varieties adapted to our changing world.
Lance Cadle-Davidson, Research Plant Pathologist, USDA-ARS Grape Genetics Research Unit
630 W. North St., Geneva, NY 14456
CadleDavidson@ars.usda.gov
Lance is a project Co-Director, leads the powdery mildew phenotyping team, and serves on the genetics and breeding teams. His role is to provide germplasm, strategies, protocols, and marker technology to make powdery mildew resistance breeding easy, efficient, and effective.
Dario Cantu, Associate Professor, University of California-Davis
2146 RMI – North Building, Davis, CA 95616
dacantu@ucdavis.edu
Dario is Associate Professor and Louis P. Martini Endowed Chair in the Department of Viticulture and Enology at UC Davis. As member of the VitisGen2 Genetic team, Dario leads the genome assemblies and transcriptome analyses.
Anne Fennell, Professor, South Dakota State University
254b Northern Plains Biostress Laboratory, Brookings, SD 57007 anne.fennell@sdstate.edu
Anne Fennell’s research focuses on grapevine bud dormancy. In particular, she works to identify the genes and pathways that affect cord hardiness, bud dormancy, and chilling requirements.
Peter Schweitzer, Senior Research Associate, Cornell University
149 Biotechnology Bldg., Ithaca, NY 14853 pas48@cornell.edu
Peter is the director of the Genomics facility in the Institute of Biotechnology at Cornell University. His lab performs the genotyping/sequencing assays for the VitisGen2 project.
Qi Sun, Senior Research Associate, Cornell Bioinformatics Service Unit
618 Rhoades Hall, Ithaca, NY 14853
QiSun@cornell.edu
Qi’s main responsibility is on the computational side, mostly in the development of haplotype references and low cost genotyping methodologies for marker discovery and breeding decisions. Qi’s group also manages databases and cloud computing infrastructure for this project.
Postdocs:
Avi Karn, Postdoctoral Associate, Cornell University
630 W. North St., Geneva, NY 14456
ak956@cornell.edu
Avinash (Avi) is a postdoctoral research scientist in The VitisGen2 project. The theme of his project is in the area of mark-assisted breeding on agro-economic and other important traits such as powdery mildew disease resistance, seedless-ness, flower sex, and fruit quality and composition.
Cheng Zou, Postdoctoral Associate, Cornell University
Rhodes Hall, Ithaca, NY 14850
cz355@cornell.edu
Cheng is working on using bioinformatics tools to assist the grape breeding practice. For example: designing more efficient molecular markers using whole genome de novo assembly, pan-genome graph construction, etc. She is also performing an integrated data-mining of the genetic data that we have collected.
Melanie Massonet, Postdoctoral Associate, UC Davis
2105 Robert Mondavi Institute-North Building, Davis, CA, 95616
mmassonnet@ucdavis.edu
Melanie is a postdoctoral associate in Dario Cantu’s lab in the Department of Viticulture and Enology at UC Davis. Melanie is in charge of the genome-wide transcriptional analyses of the breeding populations for powdery mildew resistance gene stacking and wine grape quality.