(upbeat music)
-: By 2050, we're gonna need twice as much food
from the same land as we grow today
in order to feed the world's growing population.
We're standing in the Beadle Center greenhouse
that's on the city campus
of the University of Nebraska, Lincoln.
Around me you see a diverse set of corn and sorghum plants
that we use to understand how the genes in corn and sorghum
determine the final properties of plants and crops.
The focus of what's going on here is to take samples
from plants and be able to measure either variation in DNA,
variation in gene expression, that sort of thing.
If we can understand how genotype
determines the traits of a plant, we have a better shot
at being able to meet the growing demand
for food and fuel around the world.
In order to do that,
we need to collect many many measurements
from hundreds and thousands of plants.
Not just in one environment,
but in many different environments.
So different places around the state,
different years, different stress treatments.
A lot of the work we do at the University of Nebraska
is in developing high throughput
of phenotyping technologies.
Phenotyping is very fancy word for a very simple concept,
which is just measuring the properties of plants.
So these are things like the automated greenhouse,
the Spidercam facility,
also a lot of drone-based and robotic phenotyping.
And so now we have tools that most other universities lack,
which allow us to be developing the methods
and approaches that I think everyone
will be using five, 10, or 20 years from now.
We were able to release the first complete version
of the proso millet genome.
What's really exciting about proso millet
is that it can use water much more efficiently
than even sorghum and much more than corn.
Now that we have this reference genome,
it will be possible for us to go and identify differences
between different proso millet varieties,
identify variants of genes that are more or less useful
for getting higher yield and varieties,
and, hopefully, develop new varieties
that will be both higher yielding
and have better agronomic performance.
Yeah, so I won the North American Plant
Phenotyping Network's Early Career investigator award.
I was the inaugural award.
Plant phenotyping is just such a new field
and so being able to be a part of this
new emerging community feels really good.