“Re-imaging how new technologies will shape germplasm improvement”

Nathan Springer,

Wednesday, April 30th, 2025

Agronomy 3140, 3:00 – 4:00 pm

Description: Plant breeding has been exceptionally successful in developing highly productive and resilient varieties for many crop species. While plant breeding continues to evolve there are also a variety of biotechnology applications that offer the potential to augment our ability to develop improved varieties. We will consider a variety of technologies and applications that can add new traits or change the ways we think about moving genetic information.  I will highlight several of the key challenges that limit the current application of these technologies.

Nathan Springer is a Crop Genome Editing Lead at Bayer Crop Sciences. He has worked across functions at Bayer to develop a genome editing pipeline since 2022. Prior to joining Bayer he led a maize genetics and genomics research group at the University of Minnesota for nearly 20 years.  This research group made contributions to our understanding of maize genome structure, epigenome dynamics, heterosis, gene expression variation and transposon biology.