Peterson Wins 2012 Cotton Biotechnology Award

January 28, 2013

Dr. Daniel Peterson recently won a national award for his collaboration with a team of scientists to map a cotton genome. Peterson is the director of MSU's Institute for Genomics, Biocomputing and Biotechnology and scientist with the Mississippi Agricultural and Forestry Experiment Station. He received the 2012 Cotton Biotechnology Award from the National Cotton Council of America and Cotton Incorporated.

Peterson, with colleagues Andrew Paterson from the University of Georgia, Jonathan Wendel from Iowa State University, Jeremy Schmutz from the U.S. Department of Energy's Joint Genome Institute, and Daniel Rokhsar from the University of California – Berkeley accepted the honor at the Plant and Animal Genome Conference in San Diego. Scientists from 31 international institutions contributed to the project.

The award recognized the team's pioneering efforts over the past 12 years to map the genetic structure of the ancestors of upland cotton. Their work culminated in developing a "gold standard" genome sequence of Gossypium raimondii. They published their findings in the journal Nature.

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