HorticultureAdventure. Leadership. Excellence. Community.

Department of Horticultural ScienceSummer 2015

Excellence. Adrian Hegeman is creating field-changing software for metabolomics

Leadership. Students in a new interdisciplinary aquaponics course make strides in the industry

Undergraduate Lauren Innes works to change the way U students look at food

Adventure.Matthew Clark takes the lead on the U of M’s grape breeding program

Stacey Noble reflects on the qualities and experiences that defined her career

Community.The Forever Green Initiative funds sustainable agriculture research to make empty fields a thing of the past

INSIDE:Horticulture. A culture of...

Meeting Renegade FarmersIn April, this year’s Markhart Scholars (upper left), along with professors and graduate students working in organic and local food systems, joined a discussion and dinner with author of “Lentil Underground” Liz Carlisle (bottom middle) and the protagonist of the novel, renegade farmer David Oien (bottom left).

In a world where Google can teach any-one about the aerodynamics of a golf ball or 5 million strangers can see the

same Facebook post, it’s hard to imagine that scientists often struggle to process and share their data. Thanks to a fellowship from the University of Minnesota Infor-matics Institute, Associate Professor Adri-an Hegeman is working to create a software platform called Galaxy-M to address this issue in the field of metabolomics. A single plant can have tens of thousands of metabolites, and many of these metabolites can be measured using modern chemical analysis techniques. The abundance of data from these sorts of ex-periments has created new challenges and opportunities for researchers trying to fig-ure out how to pull valuable information from big data sets. “Researchers in classi-cal metabolomics look at pattern changes in thousands of chemicals. Then they make sure those changes are real and fig-ure out which chemicals in those changes are interesting,” explained Hegeman. “It lets you focus in on what’s important and use your resources in a targeted way.” De-tecting those changes can be a challenge, because analyzing the data with different processes can reveal different information about a single data set. “You can get some info on your data set from one process, but not enough,” said Hegeman. Researchers often independently develop programs to meet their lab’s

Excellence.

Research in Collaboration: Unifying Metabolomics with Galaxy-M Another important component of Galaxy-M is that it will be open source, which means that the original code is made public and can be changed by any-one. Hegeman pointed out, “We’re in a phase in metabolomics as a field where lots of people are developing tools, but they’re not sticking the info together or sharing data sets.” Making Galaxy-M open source allows users to add in features and pro-grams that are useful to them that may not have been in the original program. When users make add-ons to Galaxy-M though, it will then be easily accessible to other researchers replicating the experiment. Doing this ensures that the program can grow and change to meet the needs of me-tabolomics as the needs of the field shift. A project like this requires time before it can be useable. The fellowship gave Hegeman the time needed to figure out what the program will look like, but he’s currently seeking support to bring Galaxy-M to reality. “We’re going to really start working in earnest next fall, and then it’s about a three year project. Hopefully we should have a good workable version in three to four years.” ♦

needs, but other scientists may struggle to access the program. Through Galaxy-M, researchers can instead draw upon a multitude of programs that other re-searchers will also be able access easily. As an added bonus, researchers can run their data through these various data processing tools and then display the results side by side for comparison. “If you can get those results next to the other results in your da-tabase, you can start doing more and start to learn which tools work best for different experiments,” said Hegeman. Galaxy-M goes beyond simply gathering programs together. In order to reproduce an experiment, a researcher needs to not only have access to the pro-gram that the original experiment used, but they need to know the exact settings used by the program. This isn’t a problem with Galaxy-M. When data is run through Galaxy-M it will capture information on the program and the settings used, which can then be published in a scientific jour-nal and replicated by other researchers.

Above: Associate Professor Adrian Hegeman leads the Plant Metabolomics Lab at the University of Minnesota.

Left: Dana Freund, a National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellow, prepares samples of purple potatoes to gather metabolomics data.

Despite having graduated only four years ago, Noble is already think-ing about the future of the horticulture industry. Much of her work involves pro-moting gardening to urban residents by focusing on products that work well in small spaces such as win-dow boxes or balconies. She hopes that getting younger generations interested in growing plants will help the industry as a whole. “I have growers asking me all the time for people to work in the bedding plants industry. There’s a dearth of qualified people. Hopefully this means there will be more opportunities and higher paying ones.” Noble reflects fondly on her experience at the University and her degree program, offering words of advice and encour-agement to current students. “Any time there’s an opportunity to network, take it. The great thing about this industry is that we’re willing to share our information. You don’t see that often.” She was warned upon graduation that a degree in horticulture doesn’t pay a lot or that it might be difficult to find work — but if anything that’s only fueled her. “You need to know what you want, and then go out and ask for it,” Noble finished. “If it feels right, it probably is right.” ♦

Adventure.

Alumni Spotlight: Traveling Across the Country with Stacey Noble

Matthew Clark grew up in a farming commu-nity in northern Iowa where he always had an interest in plants. He completed a B.A. in Psychology from St. John’s University in Collegeville, MN. After working for several years in non-profit social services he chose to switch careers and study horticulture. Clark completed an M.S. and Ph.D. in plant breeding and genetics at the U of M under Professor Jim Luby. He has studied native grass species for use as low input turf, apple fruit quality traits, apple scab resistance and grape diseases. “Minnesota has been home to me for many years. I look forward to continuing my career here while working alongside a growing and motivated industry,

and continued collaborations with grape and wine experts from around the globe,” said Clark. In his new position he will be involved with research, teaching and Extension educa-tion for grape breeding and enology. He is interested in breeding plants that are tolerant to abiotic stresses, diseases and insects. ♦

Vines and Wines: Welcome to New Assistant Professor Matthew Clark

For alumna Stacey Noble (B.S. Horticulture ’11) there is no typical workday. Her home base is in Chicago, but about half of her time is spent traveling. Where to? At the beginning of

May she flew out for a conference in Las Vegas, Nevada. However, as a Burpee home gardens program representative for Ball Horti-cultural Company, her work spans the western U.S., Midwest and Great Lakes — which adds up to roughly half the country. Noble showed an interest in horticulture from an early age. Although she happily recalls growing up on a farm and showing flowers at 4-H, she started at the University as a biology major. “I met someone in the turf program and they suggested a horticulture degree. Switching majors two years in was scary, but I did it,” she said. “I’ve always been one to put myself into diffi-cult situations. Having the grit to get it done has really helped.” That grit and flexibility that encouraged Noble to switch majors helped her to define her career. Noble knew that she wanted a job involving travel when she entered the workforce, but attaining that took a little more thought and time. Before working for Ball Horticultural she worked as a landscaper for LandSculpt, Inc. and as a sales representative working with cut flowers at Koehler & Dramm. She wanted to return closer to her degree focus on greenhouse management and floriculture, so she thought about the skills needed to get her there. “In landscap-ing I was dealing with customers, and having conversations with them. I used negotiating skills to build more garden space, which earned my company more money. I’d built relationships, which transferred well to sales.”

“I am really interested in working with the grape growers and wine producers in Minnesota. We share a common mission of developing the best wines for our region. This starts with having improved cultivars that make quality wines, but also an un-

derstanding of what processes are required to turn our unique hybrid grapes into the best products. Our breeding program will focus on wine grapes, but the breeding lines

developed here also set the stage for locally produced table grapes.”

Community.

“The thing that really impacted me the most about speaking at the state capitol was that so many of the legislators were from the political party that I don’t sup-port. It bridged the gap between different political backgrounds to see people on both sides lobbying for something I care about. Understanding how to communi-cate with policymakers isn’t something you traditionally get in education.”

— Michelle Dobbratz

Funding the Future: The Forever Green Initiative

gether they’ve applied for grants and have worked together to increase the visibility of cover crop research to the public. This year Dobbratz and Molly Kreiser (Ph.D. Plant Biological Sciences) were invited to talk about their projects at the Minnesota state legislature. “We told them about what we were doing and why it’s important,” explained Kreiser. “That way they could see why it deserves funding.” For the students it was a unique chance to meet politicians from both sides of the aisle and discover that Minnesota representatives cared about the environ-mental impacts as well. Their testimonies were successful; recently $1 million was appropriated in the Omnibus Legacy Bill for the Forever Green Initiative. With this support, and hopefully more in the years to come, Forever Green will transform the landscape of Minnesota and fund the researchers of the future. ♦

Aspring drive through Minnesota finds travelers looking at barren dirt fields over rolling hills. Come

October, all that remains of the lush sum-mer greenery is broken brown cornstalks and burning wheat fields. In the future that image could change. The Forever Green Initiative aims to make the state green from snowmelt to snowfall through fund-ing a collective of researchers and graduate student working in sustainable agriculture. Having bare soil over much of the state has a huge impact on Minne-sota’s ecology. Spring and fall rains lead to excessive runoff, which erodes the topsoil and brings nutrients and chemicals out of fields and into rivers and lakes. The vision of Forever Green, led by Don Wyse in the Department of Agronomy and Plant Genetics, is to support research on cover crops and perennial plants to keep fields green even when there isn’t a cash crop growing. An important key to the projects being chosen each year is their economic viability and what benefits they offer the agronomic systems already in place. Dozens of University research-ers have programs that fit under Forever Green’s mission, but traditionally they competed against one another for limited funding. United under Forever Green they have more power. “Instead of com-peting for the same grants, we’re working to increase the amount of funding we all get. There’s collaboration and support of

each other,” said Michelle Dobbratz (M.S. Applied Plant Sciences). In 2013, Wyse requested $14 million over 10 years from the Minnesota state legislature. Much of this money would help to support gradu-ate and undergraduate students working on projects that align with the initiative’s mission, as workforce development is an important aspect of Forever Green. For the graduate students in Horticultural Science, being part of For-ever Green offers more than just fund-ing. Often graduate students can become somewhat isolated within their depart-ment, but having a common goal allows students to get to know veterans in their field that they may not have collaborated with before. “If I hadn’t started in Forever Green, I wouldn’t have known the history behind it,” Peyton Ginakes (Ph.D. Applied Plant Sciences) noted when talking about her work on the soil effects of zone tillage practices with kura clover. “And I wouldn’t know that this research has been going on for decades in agronomy.” Talking with others working in their field has helped Forever Green students see how their work fits into the bigger picture. Being part of Forever Green also gives students a sense of camaraderie amongst each other that they might have otherwise lacked. A student group called Take Cover stemmed from Forever Green, comprised of graduate students across departments researching cover crops. To-

Above: Three graduate students in Horticultural Science who are part of Forever Green. Peyton Ginakes (left) and Michelle Dobbratz (right) work together studying kura clover living mulch systems. Molly Kreiser (center) works on advantageous rooting in hazelnuts.

students and the teachers, and that helped us all to learn more.” Designing their own research project helped students to understand both the trials of performing research in real world and the satisfac-tion of completing a project that they have invested significant time and effort into. Students presented their work to over 100 attendees at the first annual Aquaponics in Minnesota conference and wrote research papers detailing their methods and results. To read more about the projects completed as part of the class, visit the U of M Aquaponics website at aquaponics.umn.edu. ♦

Most undergraduate students expect their research to have a small impact on their field.

However, students enrolled in a new ex-periential learning class, HORT 4601 — Aquaponics: Integrated fish and plant food systems — are already making strides in aquaponics. In this annual spring semester course, led by several instructors including Horticultural Science Professor Neil An-derson, students designed research proj-ects that address real problems posed by industry professionals.

Leadership.

Above: Laura Hayes (left, B.S. Horticulture and Food Science ’16) and Danielle Ringle (right, B.S. Forest Ecosystem Management and Conservation ‘15) collecting data on food safety hazards in aquaponic, hydroponic and soil-based systems.

Aquaponics Students at the Leading Edge of Discovery Aquaponics is a budding industry in Minnesota, having grown in popular-ity among small businesses, greenhouses and enthusiasts since the early 1990s. “It’s a fusion of two production systems, hydroponics and aquaculture,” explained Neil Anderson. “And ultimately this fu-sion is more beneficial for both.” In this system the waste produced by farmed fish or other aquatic animals supplies nutrients for plants grown hydroponically that in turn purify the water. Because the industry is so new, research on aquaponic systems is sparse. This means that under-graduate students can make a big impact on the field even in a single semester. “The students are at the forefront of discovery,” said Anderson. The combination of plants and an-imals in this system drew students of var-ied majors and backgrounds to the class, and each group tailored a research project to meet their interests. Just a few of the projects completed in 2015 looked at the cost-benefit analysis of heating fish tanks, food safety hazards between systems, and the effect of different lights on plants. “The class was really beneficial,” said Lindsey Miller (B.S. Horticulture, ’15). “There is a lot of diversity in the backgrounds of the

Above: Students presenting research posters at the 2015 Aquaponics in Minnesota conference.

Student Spotlight: Lauren Innes is Getting Real Food on Campusthere was support for this goal, team members traversed campus to get over 1,000 signatures from the Uni-versity community. What really gives the group a voice is community involvement. In addition to having an active presence around campus, they have a Facebook page with the name “UMN Real Food Challenge.” Alumni, faculty and staff who are interested in being involved in the challenge can like the page to see upcoming events or initiatives. Students interested in getting involved should contact Karen Weldon, regional field coordina-tor, at Karen.y.weldon@gmail.com. To read more about the Real Food Challenge and Lau-ren’s involvement, see the extended article on the Horticultural Science website at z.umn.edu/laureninnes. ♦

As a native of the Twin Cities metro, undergraduate Lauren Innes (B.S. Food Systems ’17) had little interest in agricul-ture or food systems when she started as a pre-nursing

student at the University. Yet, all it took was a class project about Urban Oasis and founder Tracy Sides to completely change her focus. After switching to a major in food systems, her new inter-est led her to join the University of Minnesota chapter of the Real Food Challenge. The Real Food Challenge is a national organization that works with school administrators and on-campus food decision makers to try to get more real food — defined as locally grown whole foods that are farmed through fair, ecologically sound and humane means — into university dining areas. Their goal at the U of M is to have 20 percent of food served in the dining halls be real food by 2020. In 2013 the group did an inventory of Univer-sity Dining Services to see where they stood, and approximately 7 percent of the food offered was considered real. To show that

Department of Horticultural ScienceCollege of Food, Agricultural & Natural Resource Sciences University of Minnesota1970 Folwell AvenueSt. Paul, MN 55108

The University of Minnesota is an equal opportunity educator and employer. Printed on recycled and recyclable paper with at least 10 percent postconsumer material.

By Mail1970 Folwell AvenueSt. Paul, MN 55108

By Phone(612) 624-4742

Onlinehttp://www.horticulture.umn.edu

Twitter@UMNHorticulture

Facebookhttp://z.umn.edu/umhortfb

Support the Departmenthttp://horticulture.umn.edu/support

Connect with Us!

The Department of Horticultural Science is excited to in-troduce the first annual Distinguished Alumni Award. This award will honor an alumnus/alumna who has attained professional distinction in horticultural science as evidenced by outstanding professional achievement on a state, national or international level.

Anyone will be able to submit a nomination, and alumni will be welcome to self-nominate. Keep an eye on the website or in the next newsletter for more news on when nominations open and for more specifics on eligibility, criteria and the ap-plication process.

Horticultural Science Distinguished Alumni Award

Coming Soon

On June 12 the department hosted a reception to thank Pat and Margaret Luby, pictured above with President Kaler and spouse Karen Kaler, for establishing the Luby Family Honeycrisp Chair for Fruit Crop Innovation. Their generous donation will ensure continued research innovation in fruit crop breeding, genetics, and variety development for years to come.

Luby Family Honeycrisp Chair for Fruit Crop Innovation