Quantifying Plant Soluble Protein and Digestible Carbohydrate Content, Using Corn (Zea mays) As an Exemplar

 

Congratulations to Christine Madamba, Zoey Kramer and Benjamin Thomas for winning presentation prizes at this year’s 2018 Ecological Integration Symposium. Christine and Zoey won 1st and 3rd place, respectively, in the undergrad talk category while Ben won 2nd place in the undergrad poster category. All the undergrads in the lab do an excellent job, and it is great to see Christine, Zoey and Ben get some much deserved recognition.

Additional credit goes out to our very own Ashley Tessnow who did a great job making the event happen as part of the organizing committee!

Greg received the 2018 Entomological Society of America Southwestern Branch Award for Excellence in Integrated Pest Management. The presentation was made at the 2018 Southwestern Branch meeting in Albuquerque, NM on March 28, 2018. It is always a special honor to be recognized by your peers. Thanks Southwestern Branch!

Our industry partner, Indigo Ag, has reported preliminary performance results of Indigo Cotton, commercially-available cotton seed treated with an endophyte initially discovered in our lab, that was planted across 270,000 acres of the U.S. cotton belt in 2017. Post-harvest results from the 2017 growing season demonstrated a 14% average yield increase across localities with an added value of $68/per acre for cotton producers.

It may sound crazy, but we have seen effects like this dating back to our first cotton endophyte research field trials in 2012.

Full story here.

Endophyte research in the lab was selected by the Texas Office of Environmental Quality as a Finalist for the 2018 Texas Environmental Excellence Award for Agriculture. We ended up in 2nd place, but are nonetheless very honored to have been recognized as a finalist for this award.

The full list of winners and finalists is available here.