From: Clay Sneller <sneller.5@osu.edu>
Date: Wed Jan 14, 2004 5:19:15 PM US/Eastern
To: William Morgan <wmorgan@mail.wooster.edu>
Subject: Re: I.S. opportunities

I do not have a web site for the lab. Here is a brief synopsis of what we do. Not all if lab orientated, and most combine lab and field research. For an IS student, we can be flexible about there tasks as they have different needs from wage-only students. For someone just doing hourly work, then we are really looking for hours in the lab.
1. Develop new varieties of wheat for Ohio farmers. Evaluate 25,000 new lines each year in the field and lab for yield, general fitness, resistance to three diseases, and ability of flour to make desired product. This is primarily field work with lots of computed work.
2. Dissect genetics of wheat resistance to Fusarium Head Blight (FHB). This is a good place perhaps for an IS project. We are mapping genes for resistance from several sources. Resistance is incomplete and controlled by multiple genes. Strategy is to combine resistant genes to achieve desired level of resistance. Involves field, greenhouse, and marker work. This is an ongoing project with many directions to go. We interact extensively with scientists in the Plant Path department on this.
3. Dissect genetics of wheat quality. Here quality is defined as amount of flour milled from grain, and the functionality of the flour. Quality is multidimensional with many attributes. We have two mapping populations and additional populations are underway. We have identified several chromosome regions that affect various components of quality. Interestingly, some regions affect a suite of quality attributes, and some regions have genes that have been reported to affect quality in other types of wheat, but not yet in Ohio wheat. I believe there are IS opportunities here. This is mostly lab work as my field crew handles the growing of the grain and the quality analyses.
A side project relating to quality is assessing the impact of select transgenes on wheat quality. Populations have been developed for this. Again this mostly involves lab work.
Hope this helps and I would be glad to meet with any student interested in an IS or wage-only project to see if we can meet their needs as well as my own.