Mark Earl Sorrells, professor in school of Integrative Plant Science Plant Breeding and Genetics Section at Cornell University, sits down to chat about planning this year’s National Association of Plant Breeders (NAPB) virtual meeting. The meeting is being hosted by Cornell and takes place Aug. 15-19, 2021. To register visit https://napb2021.com/.

Mark will give the open meeting kickoff tomorrow, Aug. 16.

“There’s a lot of logistics involved in planning a virtual meeting,” he says. “I have some very good people helping me out. We have a good organizing committee, local and national organizing committee that is helping to organize the sessions, select speakers, collect the bios and abstracts and the titles of the talks. This meeting has a lot more moving parts than most meetings, because there are a number of side meetings, breakout rooms, etc., that happen during the four days of the meeting.”

He says he’s particularly looking forward to tomorrow’s introductory session on high throughout phenotyping & GxE moderated by Kelly Robbins and Virginia Moore of Cornell University. The session will feature several speakers including Nick Wiering, a discovery breeder with Syngenta. He received his MS and PhD in plant breeding and genetics from the University of Minnesota. As a graduate student and as a post-doc in the Stupar lab at UMN, he focused on the improvement of legume cover crops for northern US cropping systems.

The day will continue with a session on “CRISPRing Crops for Climate Change” followed by a session on sustainability and the role we can play as plant breeders and scientists.

“I’m very excited about the potential for gene editing and I’m particularly interested in modifying the gene expression that generates quantitative variation, which is really the lifeblood of a plant breeder, because most of our traits are quantitative in nature,” Mark goes on to say. “Generating novel quantitative variation is the future of wheat breeding.”

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