Behind each really good dataset I (and our AI models) get to explore) is the hard work and determination of a team of scientists. The folks in this photo who volunteered to spend their Saturday husking and harvesting ears 6,800 ears in a cold and muddy Nebraska corn field. Bibash Rokaya, our local soil science expert spotted fasciated ear produced when the meristem that is supposed to develop an ear goes wild and keeps growning. Bo Peng is getting his PhD in Food Science, picked out my favorite line from the whole diversity panel, A3G-3-1-3. Probably originally from Argentina, one of the original founders of the crop breeding experiment that gave us B73 and changed corn hybrid production forever. Pooja, Shukla is a fulbright scholar and foxtail millet expert from Hyderabad and won the grand prize in our cool ear prediction context for her photo of the Xenia Effect in action.

Ed Cahoon on translating research. “Right now we do some research we publish in Plant Cell and we are happy. Should we be happy? Yes. But we can go farther here in Nebraska.”

Three students from my lab speaking on three very different topics a week from today: 1) A really nice story about how "control" samples can mislead in RNA-seq analyses. 2) How working with pan-genomes finally delivers on the promise of identifying large structural variants in kmer based GWAS. 3) Set out to study plant diseases using image analyses and ended up mapping out transcriptional networks controlling programmed cell using natural loss of function alleles.

An impressive and happy group of folks! Turns out collecting thousands of sorghum leaf samples goes much faster -- and lab morale stays much higher -- at 70 F/21 C than at 95 F/35 F.

Forty days ago our lab planted almost 1,000 kinds of sorghum from around the globe. The first one is already getting ready to flower. Photo by @Chidu_ullagaddi.