Professor Wing's lab focuses on the discovery and utilization of natural variation in the genus Oryza to help solve the 10-billion people question: i.e. "How we feed our world without destroying our world by 2050". At present, the Wing lab is focusing on the generation of Platinum Standard Reference Genomes for cultivated rice and its wild relatives to create a pan-Oryza genome that will serve as a template to create a digital genebank (DGB) for rice. This DGB will be interrogated to discover and analyze essentially all SNP and structural variation that exists across the genus. Such data will be linked with high-throughput phenotyping data derived from a global rice array composed of ~3000 diverse rice accessions planted in multiple locations around the world, over multiple seasons. Such data can then be used to accelerate the breeding of "Green Super Rice" varieties that are adapted to different environmental conditions, including the desert environments of the Middle East.

Genomics, Computational Bioscience, Functional Biology