The Culling

The Culling is an animated, short film graduate thesis. It explores ideas of perception by examining an anthropomorphic tribal group of lobsters that live in the fish tank of a New England seafood restaurant. The story is told through the experiences of a new comer to this lobster tribe. It focuses on his reactions to the odd traditions and beliefs of his peers in this new and strange place. The film is a 2D animation that has been produced digitally using various video, audio and animation software. The goal of this paper is to outline the production of this thesis film from concept to completion, as well as provide some supplementary materials used in the creative process

Crop ontology in support of conservation and use of banana genetic resources

Poster presented at Workshop on Crop Ontology and Phenotyping Data Interoperability. Montpellier (France), 31 Mar-4 Apr 201

Using genotyping-by-sequencing to understand Musa diversity

Poster presented at Plant and Animal Genome, PAG XXII. San Diego (USA), 11-15 Jan 201

In situ conservation—harnessing natural and human-derived evolutionary forces to ensure future crop adaptation

Ensuring the availability of the broadest possible germplasm base for agriculture in the face of increasingly uncertain and variable patterns of biotic and abiotic change is fundamental for the world's future food supply. While ex situ conservation plays a major role in the conservation and availability of crop germplasm, it may be insufficient to ensure this. In situ conservation aims to maintain target species and the collective genotypes they represent under evolution. A major rationale for this view is based on the likelihood that continued exposure to changing selective forces will generate and favor new genetic variation and an increased likelihood that rare alleles that may be of value to future agriculture are maintained. However, the evidence that underpins this key rationale remains fragmented and has not been examined systematically, thereby decreasing the perceived value and support for in situ conservation for agriculture and food systems and limiting the conservation options available. This study reviews evidence regarding the likelihood and rate of evolutionary change in both biotic and abiotic traits for crops and their wild relatives, placing these processes in a realistic context in which smallholder farming operates and crop wild relatives continue to exist. It identifies areas of research that would contribute to a deeper understanding of these processes as the basis for making them more useful for future crop adaptation

Genetic diversity and core subset selection in ex situ seed collections of the banana crop wild relative Musa balbisiana

Crop wild relatives (CWRs) play a key role in crop breeding by providing beneficial trait characteristics for improvement of related crops. CWRs are more efficiently used in breeding if the plant material is genetically characterized, but the diversity in CWR genetic resources has often poorly been assessed. Seven seed collections of Musa balbisiana, an important CWR of dessert and cooking bananas, originating from three natural populations, two feral populations and two ex situ field collections were retrieved and their genetic diversity was quantified using 18 microsatellite markers to select core subsets that conserve the maximum genetic diversity. The highest genetic diversity was observed in the seed collections from natural populations of Yunnan, a region that is part of M. balbisiana's centre of origin. The seeds from the ex situ field collections were less genetically diverse, but contained unique variation with regards to the diversity in all seed collections. Seeds from feral populations displayed low genetic diversity. Core subsets that maximized genetic distance incorporated almost no seeds from the ex situ field collections. In contrast, core subsets that maximized allelic richness contained seeds from the ex situ field collections. We recommend the conservation and additional collection of seeds from natural populations, preferentially originating from the species' region of origin, and from multiple individuals in one population. We also suggest that the number of seeds used for ex situ seed bank regeneration must be much higher for the seed collections from natural populations