Editors Bradford & Nonogaki Announce New Seed Book
Seed Development, Dormancy and Germination provides a comprehensive overview of seed biology from the point of view of the developmental and regulatory processes that are involved in the transition from a developing seed through dormancy and into germination and seedling growth. It examines the complexity of the environmental, physiological, molecular and genetic interactions that occur through the life cycle of seeds, along with the concepts and approaches used to analyze seed dormancy and germination behavior. It also identifies the current challenges and remaining questions for future research. The book is directed at plant developmental biologists, geneticists, plant breeders, seed biologists and graduate students.  For more information go to Blackwell Publishing.

New Grant Awarded for Pepper
Allen Van Deynze, (Seed Biotechnology Center) and Alex Kozik (Genome Center) received a $1.1 Million grant from UC Discovery and a consortium of seed companies including: Rijk Zwaan, Enza Zaden, Bayer, DeRuiter seeds, Syngenta Inc. Seminis Inc and Harris Moran/Vilmorin to develop a comprehensive Affymetrix Array to discover and genotype DNA markers, Single Feature Polymorphisms, in pepper. This 3-year project will take advantage of the current EST resources in pepper representing >30,000 unigenes to design a massively-parallel  microarray to define and map the variation in pepper breeding germplasm and genetic populations. This resource will also serve as a highly redundant microarray for expression analysis in pepper.  In collaboration with Dr. James Prince, Fresno State University, we will phenotypically characterize a population segregating for resistance to Phytophthora blight on pepper, one of the most serious diseases in pepper.  Additional collaborators are Dr. Molly Jahn, University of Wisconsin and Dr. Shanna Moore, Cornell University. This project will enable genetic and functional studies on a whole genome scale, as well as rapidly link markers to traits and candidate genes for breeding.