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University of Central Florida's Botanical Society to create enhanced peppers through plant breeding project


Florida, USA
September 7, 2022


Hani Hassan, a senior biology major (right), and Julia Dreistadt, a senior biology major (left), present the Plant Breeding Initiative to volunteers on Friday. The students explain the role of volunteers and the opportunity to get involved in a research project that started in 2019. - Gabriela Sayuri da Cunha


The UCF Botanical Society is working on a plant breeding initiative to create a tasteful pepper with medicinal value.

The Plant Breeding Initiative, a biology department project, is run by students who are on the plant sciences track. Chase Mason, a biology associate professor and faculty advisor, said the project consists of combining both phenotypic and genotypic data to make targeted crosses.

Mason said that phenotypic data refers to physical traits of an organism and genotypic data refers to a set of DNA responsible for those unique traits. The exchange makes possible to cross specific traits and characteristics of the pepper. 

The project started in 2019, when Mason said the group first decided what plant to grow.

“The first year was sort of a planning year; we weren’t sure on what we should work on,” Mason said. “So what I had the students do was to come up with a hundred of ideas and narrow them down, so we came up with peppers. Primarily because it was easy to grow, good for this climate, really diverse, culinary and culturally important globally.”

Mason said the choices of peppers were not in vain. He said in addition to the ease of growing this type of plant, it is culturally important for many different types of countries.

“We are in Central Florida, which is a very diverse region, and there are a lot of awesome culinary traditions that have come together in Central Florida," Mason said. "And peppers are important for many of them, whether you are talking about South Asia, Africa, Eastern Europe and South America. All kinds of peppers are used differently, so it seemed to be relevant."

The PBI is run by seniors and some volunteers who help in different areas, such as the maintenance of plants in the hoop house, deseeding (removing the seeds) and fruit phenotyping (collecting data of plants such as height, wing length and other traits), according to organizers. 

“The main goal of the initiative is just breeding a new culture of peppers," said Anisa Khalid, a senior biology major and one of the student leaders for the project. "In 2019 when it started they had an initial growth, so they grew these 92 different pepper plants, and then they were still growing when I joined."

Khalid said students who joined in the past years have been collecting peppers from these plants since then.

"One goal of the project is to train the students in how to do sort of plant science project and give them some experience that will help them get jobs," Mason said. "The other one is to make better peppers in taste, resistance and even in medicinal areas." 

Besides the possibility of creating a new type of pepper that could even be helpful in medicine, the leaders responsible for the project said this is a great research opportunity for undergraduates.

“I think it is a good opportunity for undergrads to get involved with a research and taking initiative. If we have a result that can become a paper, students will have their names there,” said Keivan Bahmani, biology postdoctoral advisor. 

Mason said volunteers come from a variety of fields, but some biology majors are particularly eager about PBI.

“I am excited and expect to learn how to breed stuff, take care of plants and how to manage your garden,” Sarah Lachnicht, a sophomore biology major, said.

Khalid said that at the time, the project is in a transitional period as they cleared out all of the plants they had growing this summer to begin a targeting breeding goal. In the coming weeks, she said the group will be germinating plants.

Khalid said that in October, the initiative will be in motion again and they will focus on breeding and creating a different pepper.

“My short term goal, of course, is to get these super parents out, which have stack resistances, but at the end, it would be really cool to have a full new cultivar development from the PBI, so a pepper that we created, that is distinct from any other peppers,” Khalid said. 

 

 



More news from: University of Central Florida


Website: https://www.ucf.edu/

Published: September 7, 2022

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