Do you want to learn more about the research Dr. Paul Gepts and his team are doing at UC Davis? Here is your chance!
Mark your calendars for the UC Davis Dry Bean Field Day, Thursday, September 4, 2014 from 10am to noon.
Join Paul Gepts’s “Bean Team” and their collaborators for a tour of their common bean and lima bean field projects at UC Davis Agronomy Field Headquarters (their bean fields are located near the Bee Biology building, between the airport landing strip on the South, and Hutchison Drive on the North.) in Davis, California
Field projects they are working on at Agronomy Headquarters this year include:
1) Lima Beans: Lygus resistance yield trials in Lima beans (new introductions from CIAT), and the field-phenotyping of the F6 generation of a RIL population created from highly divergent Lima bean parents (UC Haskell and UC 92).
2) Common Beans: They are continuing their studies of drought resistance and photosynthetic behavior in common beans, one created by crossing wild by domestic parents, and the other by crossing multiple drought-tolerant domesticated parents
3) And, they are collecting a second year of data on an observational nursery of heirloom beans for potential organic production.
For those interested in, the field visit will be followed by a short tour of the greenhouse plantings: lima bean increases, common bean root observation trials, and garbanzo crossings: 12:15 to 12:45 pm, meet at Orchard Park Greenhouse 75.
Dr. Gepts enjoys his job as professor of Plant Sciences & Geneticist/Breeder at UC Davis. Dr. 
Gepts is native of Belgium and he holds a degree from the Faculte Universitaire de Sciences Agronomiques, Gembloux, Belgium (1976) a PhD in plant breeding and genetics from the University of Wisconsin, Madison (1984) and a post doctorate fellowship from the University of California, Riverside (1987). He has been on the faculty at UC Davis since 1987. Dr. Gepts specialty and focus is in genetics, plant biology and systematics and evolutionary biology. UC Davis is a world leader in the science of plant improvement, with programs in genetics, genomics, plant breeding and biodiversity. Dr. Gepts is leading the UC Davis bean breeding program producing new varieties of limas, garbs and common bean with support from the California Dry Bean Advisory Board.
He enjoys seeing his students blossom from shy undergraduate and graduate students to becoming confident members of his research team. The graduate and undergraduate student interns work in the lab and field doing research in genomics. Genomics is a branch of genetics that studies organisms with their full DNA sequence or genomes. It’s an application of new techniques tied to large scale high impact analysis of DNA. Genomics plant breeding used to be mostly just in the field and now it goes back and forth between the field and the lab. He puts the interns in charge of some of the experiments in the lab and the field. This is where they do plant DNA studies using naturally occurring traits to increase bean yield, drought tolerance, pest and disease resistance. They also do research trials in cooperation with farmers in their fields so that the research can be conducted in the conditions which is as close as possible to what the growers face. Drought tolerance traits will be more important in the future here in California especially as the water situation worsens. At the UC Dry Bean Field Day to be held at the bean fields west of the UC Davis central campus on September 4th the students are the ones that will present their findings to the researchers, growers, UC Cooperative Extension personnel, industry representatives and other personnel. The field day is important to show the farmers who are ultimately their target as well as the consuming public the results of the studies.
Direction to the field: location map: (Bee Biology Road)
