ABOUT THE AWARD

This award is to encourage graduate students to publish their research during the time they are in the graduate program a prize will be awarded to graduate students who publish from their thesis work during the time they are registered in the applicable program as a graduate student. These were papers published from September 1, 2018 – December 31, 2019

The prize is monetary as well as recognition in the Departmental Blog for each peer-reviewed publication that is derived from the student’s thesis work. A student may win the prize multiple times during their graduate program.  The prizes are awarded on an annual basis.

2020 WINNERS

Jason Lanoue (Bernard Grodzinski)

Artificial Lighting Technologies for Agricultural Production Jason Lanoue, University of Guelph, Department of Agriculture, Guelph, ON, Canada; and Agriculture & Agri-Foods Canada, Harrow, ON, Canada Evangelos D Leonardos and Bernard Grodzinski, University of Guelph, Department of Agriculture, Guelph, ON, Canada.  This book chapter written by Jason is a collection of literature related to the relatively new and ever advancing field of artificial lighting in agricultural production. Specifically, the chapter focuses on the advancement of light-emitting diodes (LEDs) and how we can utilize wavelength specific lighting to manipulate plant growth during greenhouse production. This chapter is in part used as a literature introduction during Jason’s final thesis.

Effect of Elevated CO₂ and Spectral Quality on Whole Plant Gas Exchange Patterns in Tomatoes Jason Lanoue, Evangelos D. Leonardos, Shalin Khosla, Xiuming Hao, Bernard Grodzinski.  This paper published in PLoS ONE illustrates the importance of look at plants as a whole as opposed to simply extrapolate from leaf data. Within the paper looks at the interaction between CO₂ concentration and spectral quality and their effect on whole plant gas exchange in tomatoes. This research laid down the groundwork for greenhouse-based experiments with Agriculture & Agri-food Canada which looked at a novel continuous lighting treatment.

Alternating Red and Blue Light-Emitting Diodes Allows for Injury-Free Tomato Production with Continuous Lighting Jason Lanoue, Jingming Zheng, Celeste Little, Alyssa Thibodeau, Bernard Grodzinski and Xiuming Hao.  This paper represents the culmination of Jason’s work as a Ph.D. student. Here, he used information from his previous experimentations examining the effects of wavelength specific lighting and CO₂ concentration on both carbon export and whole plant gas exchange during a production style greenhouse experiemtn. This publication, for the first time, illustrated that plants are able to grow under continuous lighting without photoperiod related injury.

Cindy Rouet (Liz Lee)

Identification of a polymorphism within the Rosa multiflora muRdr1A gene linked to resistance to multiple races of Diplocarpon rosae W. in tetraploid garden roses (Rosa × hybrida)” (Rouet C., Lee E.A., O’Neill J., LeBlanc R., Somers D.J. (2019). Theor Appl Genet DOI 10.1007/s00122-019-03443-9.  This paper represents one of two main research chapters from Cindy’s thesis.  The overarching focus of her thesis is on the development of markers that can be used in the rose breeding program.  This paper reports on the identification of the muRdr1A gene and specifically the allele of muRdr1A that confers resistance to several races of black spot.

Cindy’s other main research chapter deals with looking for QTLs associated with cold hardiness and potentially translating those QTLs into the underlying genes.

Jennifer Wilker (Peter Pauls)

The publication “Wilker J, Navabi A, Rajcan I, Marsolais F, Hill B, Torkamaneh D and Pauls KP (2019) Agronomic Performance and Nitrogen Fixation of Heirloom and Conventional Dry Bean Varieties Under Low-Nitrogen Field Conditions. Front. Plant Sci. 10:952” will be a chapter in Jennifer Wilker’s PhD thesis. The work provides unique insight into the nitrogen fixing capacity of heirloom beans, some of which were sourced from First Nations in Canada. The results show that heirloom and conventional beans have a range of nitrogen fixing abilities (up to 70% of the nitrogen derived from the atmosphere), but on average, heirloom and conventional beans had similar nitrogen fixing capacities. Jennifer was involved in all aspects of the design, execution and analysis of the work. She was also very good at developing collaborations to include people with various types of expertise to complete the work and analyze the results.      

Afsaneh Sedaghatkish (Mary Ruth McDonald)

Afsaneh Sedaghatkish1, 2, Bruce D. Gossen2, Fengqun Yu2, Davoud Torkamaneh1,3 and Mary Ruth McDonald  2019. Whole-genome DNA similarity and population structure of Plasmodiophora brassicae strains from Canada. BMC Genomics 20:744  This manuscript was an very important part of Afsaneh’s thesis and presents some new and very interesting work on the genome of a protist, Plasmodiophora brassicae, which causes the disease, clubroot of Brassica crops.  Afsaneh was the first to sequence a wide range of strains of this pathogen, from different geographical regions. She demonstrated that most of  the strains did not cluster by region, pathotype or host.  This research also was the first to provide strong evidence for balancing selectio’ in P. brassicae.  That is that many genotypes exist in a single infected root, and that a change in pathotype or virulence of the pathogen is not the result of a single mutation, but results from selection pressure on the existing genotypes, exerted by the host.  This helps to explain the rapid emergence of many virulent pathotypes in Alberta, Canada. This research  is already being widely publicized by the Canola Council of Canada.

Congratulations to all!