In the mid-1900’s, scientists discovered that modern-day cotton evolved through a chance hybridization event between two different species. This process is now known as polyploidy. Although polyploidy is common in plants, scientists have struggled to develop computational methods that can handle the problems that arise during computational analysis of polyploid genomes. Our research on cotton genomics applies cutting-edge statistical and computational approaches to characterize the genome of cotton crop cultivars and breeding lines. Research topics in cotton genomics in the lab include: pangenomes (including graph pangenomes, pantranscriptomes, and other applications of multiple genome assemblies); development of computational pipelines for genetic variant discovery; creation and testing of genotyping technologies for research and development; and gene discovery through linkage and association mapping. Read More