Breeding and sustainability of shrub willow for marginal
lands in the Northeast US
Dr. Larry Smart, Associate Professor, Horticulture Section, School of Integrative Plant
Science, Cornell University
ABSTRACT
Shrub willow is among the best suited perennial crops for bioenergy feedstock production in the
Northeast US due to its high yields, ease of conversion, and overall sustainability. Breeding
efforts are aimed at improving yields on typical ag land, strengthening pest and disease
resistance, and developing cultivars that can produce viable yields on highly disturbed sites,
such as reclaimed mine land. We have developed and characterized association and linkage
mapping populations of Salix purpurea with the aim of identifying QTL and tightly-linked SNPs
for marker-assisted selection. We have adopted genotyping-by-sequencing as a high-density
marker system and have mapped putative candidate genes for a number of traits related to
yield, pest and disease resistance, and sustainability using the genome sequence and
annotation developed by the DOE Joint Genome Institute. Further yield increases,
improvements in nutrient use efficiency, and adaptation to increasingly marginal sites facilitated
by genomics-assisted breeding will broaden adoption of this highly sustainable alternative to
fossil fuels.
BIOGRAPHY
Dr. Larry Smart has been an Associate Professor and now Professor in the Horticulture Section
of the School of Integrative Plant Science at Cornell University since July 2009 and is located at
the New York State Agricultural Experiment Station in Geneva, NY. Prior to that he was a
member of the faculty at SUNY-ESF for 13 years. Larry is a plant geneticist and physiologist
and leads efforts in the genetic improvement of shrub willow as a bioenergy crop. He is a
leader of a DOE project that has sequenced the Salix purpurea genome and is using genomic
approaches to advance willow breeding and our understanding of hybrid vigor. He received his
B.S. in Biology at Cornell University and Ph.D. in Genetics at Michigan State University.
th
8 Annual NYS Biotechnology Symposium
- May 19 & 20, 2016 -