Patrick Brown
Graduate Student
Institute for Genomic Diversity
157 Biotechnology Building
Cornell University
Ithaca, New York 14853-2703
Tel: 607 254-4849
Fax: 607 255-6249
e-mail: pjb34@cornell.edu
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Training & Educational Resources
2000-2001 Research associate in maize genetics, UC Berkeley
I’m interested in plant domestication as a process that can help us understand how phenotypic change is effected at the molecular level. Specifically, I’m looking at inflorescence development in two agronomically-important grasses, sorghum and maize. My thesis work to date has focused on the quantitative genetics of inflorescence traits such as branch number, branch length, and seed number in sorghum. Sorghum shows tremendous intraspecific variation in inflorescence architecture, and is only 12 million years diverged from maize, in which inflorescence development has been extensively studied. I am now beginning to use association mapping to assess the contribution of candidate genes from maize to quantitative variation in the sorghum inflorescence. I am particularly interested in studying traits that may have been selected for during the domestication and improvement of both sorghum and maize, such as seed size, seed shattering, leaf angle, and flowering time, in order to better understand their evolutionary constraints and our prospects for improving them in the future.
Publications
Brown PJ, Klein PE, Bortiri E, Acharya CB, Rooney WL, Kresovich S. 2006. Inheritance of inflorescence architecture in sorghum. Theor Appl Genet (Epub ahead of print)
Feltus FA, Hart GE, Schertz KF, Casa AM, Kresovich S, Abraham S, Klein PE, Brown PJ, Paterson AH. 2006. Alignment of genetic maps and QTLs between inter- and intra-specific sorghum populations. Theor Appl Genet 112:1295-1305.
Brown, PJ, and Dalton, DA. 2002. In situ physiological monitoring of Lobaria oregana transplants in an old-growth forest canopy. Northwest Science 76(3):230-239.