Travis Longcore, Assistant Professor of Architecture, Biological Sciences and Spatial Sciences, is part of an interdisciplinary team researching the linkages between landscape conditions, genes, and growth traits to help provide the crops that will grow in the landscapes of the future.
Under the helm of USC Dornsife Professor Sergey Nuzhdin, the team will use genome-wide analysis to identify important adaptations in local races of chickpeas from historical collections around the world, so that they can be recommended for use in agricultural crops. Longcore's role is to map and characterize past environmental conditions at the locations of chickpea domestication and relate those conditions to future landscape conditions under global change.
The team, which includes Research Professor Paul Marjoram of the USC Keck School of Medicine, was recently awarded an $85,000, 1-year Zumberge Interdisciplinary Grant from the James H. Zumberge Research and Innovation Fund for “Population Environmental Genomics of Crop Improvement.”
“The research provides the exciting opportunity to link together past landscapes and their environmental conditions at the time of domestication to adaptations that could be bred back into crops that will thrive in a rapidly changing environment,” said Professor Longcore.
