Crop Adaptation Lab 

Welcome to the lab website of Geoff Morris

Professor in Crop Quantitative Genomics

Colorado State University
Soil & Crop Sciences | Graduate Degree Program in Ecology | Cell & Molecular Program

News

• New NSF project to uncover the fundamental basis of complex traits in crops – EDGE CMT: New methods to elucidate the omnigenic model and other emerging concepts in complex trait genetics

• Green Evolution spotlight! Project Director Geoffrey Morris talks about the origin of the 5-year, $10M project to enhance trait delivery and genetic gain in dryland cereals funded by the Gates Foundation. 

• Globally deployed sorghum aphid resistance gene RMES1 is vulnerable to biotype shifts but is bolstered by RMES2, in Carl's paper in The Plant Genome

• Introducing qrlabelr: Fast user-friendly software for machine- and human-readable labels in agricultural research and development, in Alex's paper in Gates Open Research (Software available from CRAN)

• A blueprint for optimizing water use of sorghum in the drought prone regions of the US, in Rubi's new study in Frontiers in Plant Science

• Precise colocalization of sorghum’s major chilling tolerance locus with Tannin1 due to tight linkage drag rather than antagonistic pleiotropy, in Tony's study in Theoretical & Applied Genetics 

Our research & development program

• Our mission is to understand and improve crop adaptation. We use quantitative genomics to dissect and select adaptive traits. We use a goal-directed hypothesis-driven approach integrating evolutionary genetics, crop modeling, and molecular breeding. 

• We focus on the most important cereal crops for the world's drylands — sorghum, pearl millet, and wheat. Sorghum is a global food, feed, and biomass crop — a critical climate-resilient crop of drylands worldwide, from smallholder plots in sub-Saharan Africa and Haiti to commercial farms in the U.S. Great Plains and beyond. 

Team and community

• See People in the lab

• Learn about a Goal-directed Hypothesis-driven (GoHy) scientific method: www.GoHy.org

Get resources

• Sorghum, pearl millet, and switchgrass genotyping data at Dryad

• Learn how to do more rewarding and impactful  research using a goal-directed hypothesis-driven approach (GoHy). See www.GoHy.org