W&M Research: Junk DNA and the Strawberry Genome
May 3, 2019
The old-fashioned strawberry is having a renaissance thanks to new genetic research.
William & Mary Assistant Professor of Biology Josh Puzey and two of his students joined a team of researchers to complete the first chromosome-scale assembly of the strawberry genome. Their work, recently published in the journal Nature Genetics, traces the origin of the North American strawberry and identifies a quirk in the genome that could fundamentally change how the fruit is bred.