Missouri State University

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Mountain Grove Campus Task Force

Research Outreach Priorities

1. The priorities of fundamental fruit or related research that will secure sustainable financial support by the State and Federal funding agencies.

Focused crops:

Special and rare small fruit crops include Norton grape and alternative fruits that potentially have medicinal, nutritional, aesthetical, ecological, and economic value and that are native or can be grown in Missouri and surrounding regions.

Focused Research Areas:

  • Breeding for new improved cultivars
  • Fruit genetics, genomics, and biochemistry
  • Fruit chemistry and nutraceutical research
  • Integrated Disease and pest management for sustainable production
  • Enological research on regional premier wines

Note: collaborative and cooperative research programs among University of Missouri at Columbia, Danforth Plant Science Center, and research institutes and universities in the States and abroad must be emphasized.

2. The applied research programs that address pressing problems and provide solutions for the fruit and related industries

  • Cultural practices for improving fruit quality and production
  • Evaluation and testing of fruit cultivars and native fruits
  • Fruit economics
  • Fruit statistics including types of cultivars, acreage, growing conditions, weather, diseases pests, and other basic information not readily available to fruit researchers and growers.
  • Applied virology of fruit trees
  • Integrated pest management
  • Development of value-added products from various fruits
  • Transformation and tissue culture technology of select small fruit species.

3. The outreach programs that will disseminate knowledge to industry and the community

  • Annual Midwest grape and wine conference
  • On-site training workshops
  • Small Fruit and Vegetable Conference
  • Outreach information dissemination via multiple, effective delivery systems
  • Hosting national and international conferences
  • Field day and tours
  • Attendance of regional, national and international conferences

New Personnel

Breeder with modern genetics background: directs small fruit breeding program, generates progeny population for genetic analysis of fruit quality and disease resistance, performs genetic analysis with molecular genetic markers, produces and evaluates new small fruit cultivars, applies marker assisted selection for accelerating selection of new fruit cultivars.

Fruit chemist with a focus on metabolite profiling: analyzes metabolite composition of special small fruits, investigates metabolites from special small fruits for their medicinal and nutrient values, establishes database of metabolite profiles of special small fruits.

Endowed enologist: focus on basic research with the goal of improving wine quality. Fermentation or sensory chemist.

Endowed viticulturist: focus on basic research with the goal of enhancing grape quality and production

Research associates:

  • Biotechnology research technician
  • Small fruit transformation specialist
  • Fruit economics and statistics specialist
  • Breeding assistant
  • Landscape horticulturist/greenhouse manager

Graduate students:

Cooperative Ph. D. program in Plant Sciences between the Missouri State University and the University of Missouri-Columbia