Agrotechnology

The improvement of tea quality by genetics and genomics

14^th Annual Conference on Crop Science and Agriculture

November 29-30, 2018 Bali, Indonesia

Jeffrey Bennetzen

University of Georgia, USA

Keynote: Agrotechnology

Abstract:

Tea, the product of the leaf of Camellia sinensis, is the world???s most highly consumed beverage and is an interesting study system for the genomic and metabolomic analysis of crop quality traits. We have taken advantage of the recent sequencing of the tea genome to pursue transcriptome studies of tea leaf development and plant microbiome interactions. The results indicate that a fairly small number of genes are unique to tea leaf development, compared to Camellia oleifera, a close relative that produces a leaf that is not suitable for high quality tea production. Additional results will be presented regarding the composition and stability of the tea genome, relating to the distribution of tea genetic diversity and concerning how the soil and leaf microbiomes influence tea agronomic and quality traits.

Biography :

Jeffrey Bennetzen has completed his PhD in 1980 from the University of Washington in Seattle. He then pursued his studies as Postdoctoral Fellow in a shared position between Stanford University and the University of California at Berkeley. He has worked as a Faculty Member at Purdue University. He moved to the University of Georgia to take his current position as the Giles Eminent Scholar Chair of Molecular Biology and Functional Genomics. He has also been a Professor at Anhui Agricultural University. He has published more than 200 papers in refereed journals. He is an elected Fellow of the US National Academy of Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

E-mail: maize@uga.edu