Blog

The Endelman Lab was fortunate to host Dr. Kenji Asano, from Japan’s National Agriculture and Research Organization, for a one-year sabbatical that ended February 2024. Here is a photo from his farewell dinner (Kenji is second from right): As an experienced potato breeder and geneticist, Kenji provided a huge boost to our breeding program and…

I am excited to share a new publication about mating optimization: https://doi.org/10.1093/genetics/iyae193(If you don’t have a Genetics subscription, check out the preprint version on bioRxiv: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.07.01.601581v3) I was a computational scientist before I became a plant breeder, and I have always been fascinated by optimization methods and applications. When I first learned about the “optimum…

Former lab member Lin Song defended her PhD dissertation in August 2023 and participated in the December 2023 commencement. During her final year in the lab, Lin was supported by the WPVGA Wisconsin Distinguished Graduate Fellowship. Part of her dissertation has been published, and we are preparing a manuscript about the efficacy of genomic prediction…

In August 2023, Drs. Yoshi Hosaka and Rena Sanetomo visited the Endelman Lab following their trip to the annual meeting of the Potato Association of America. They are both professors at Obihiro University in Japan. Dr. Hosaka was a visiting scientist at UW-Madison in the 1990’s, studying the genetics of self-compatibility in diploid potato with…

In 2011 I released the rrBLUP software, which became popular for genomic selection because it was easy to use (and free). But realistic breeding datasets, with multiple traits and unbalanced multi-environment trials, require more complex models than are possible in rrBLUP. R package StageWise was developed to go beyond the capabilities of most specialized software…

In November 2022, the SpudPro committee selected the name ‘Portage Russet’ for W13A11229-1rus. The name honors Portage County and has additional significance because ‘portage’ means carrying a boat between two bodies of water. Similarly, Portage Russet is a dual-purpose variety, able to meet the needs of both the fresh and frozen processing markets. FY2 seed…