News Outlet:
Business Alabama
That Old South anthem “Dixie,” maundering for the “land of cotton,” may well have been picturing Alabama, but certainly not the Alabama cotton fields of the HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology. It’s not “look away” but way ahead that the gene scientists of HudsonAlpha have in mind when they think about cotton.
“The cotton research community wants to be able to do things faster, such as import a trait for pest resistance or disease resistance. Instead of multi-year trials, it can happen much more quickly with all the genetic information in hand,” says HudsonAlpha faculty investigator Jeremy Schmutz. A leading genomics researcher out of Stanford University, Schmutz relocated to Alabama in part to be closer to the current focus of his attention as head of the plant program at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Joint Genome Institute — Gossypium raimondii. That’s Lineaus Latin for the most basic cotton genome there is.
Read the full Business Alabama story here.