Blog
2023
Hershberger Lab joins the new USAID Climate Resilient Cereals Innovation Lab The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) announced today that it has funded a new $22 million project to support the development of climate resilient cereals. The Hershberger Lab will support this project through the development of low cost, high(er)-throughput phenotyping of grain nutritional quality using spectroscopy-based methods.
2022
The Hershberger lab joins SweetCAP The Sweet Corn Coordinated Agriculture Project (SweetCAP), is a USDA NIFA-funded, multi-institution and multi-disciplinary effort to support sweet corn improvement across the US. Earlier this year, a second iteration of SweetCAP was selected for funding through the Specialty Crop Research Initiative.
It’s official - we have decided on our first crop! The Hershberger lab has started efforts towards building a butter bean (Phaseolus lunatus) breeding program. Butter beans, for those of you not from the Southern US, are also known as Lima beans.
Maybe you’ve read about mobile spectrometers in the latest issue of your favorite journal, or maybe the lab down the hall can’t stop talking about them at the department coffee hour. Regardless of how you first heard about them, mobile near-infrared spectrometers can seem too good to be true. Can you really predict the quality of your grain, fruit, or root non-destructively and without investing in a benchtop spectrometer that costs more than a brand new car?