Ella Ludwig
Research Focus
Crops are essential to humanity, providing food, fiber, feed, and biofuels. Studying the genetic changes underlying the evolution of crops can shed light on how they may adapt to future environmental changes. Structural genomic changes have been shown to influence key traits, making it vital to assess structural diversity in crops and their wild relatives. My PhD project focuses on the structural diversity of grain amaranth, a nutritious pseudocereal from the Americas. This crop was domesticated three times from a single wild ancestor, making it an ideal model for studying the repeatability of crop evolution and its impact on structural diversity. I am constructing a pangenome for amaranth, which I will leverage to investigate structural variation and its role in domestication and the control of important traits.
