Dr. Craig Dent

Potato is among the three most important food crops worldwide. Despite its importance, our knowledge of the genomic makeup of modern potato cultivars is negligibly small as the autotetraploid and partially inbred genomes challenge conventional strategies for genome analyses. We recently developed a new method to assemble autotetraploid haplotypes using single-cell-based pollen genotyping. I'm 1) contributing to the genome assembly of additional potato cultivars and 2) developing computational tools to analyze diversity in modern cultivars, based on the newly assembled haplotypes.