2018 Harvest complete
Cool and wet September conditions delayed harvesting and plant collection from the plots, however, great weather during October made up for it!
Summer 2018
Shannon Froese has completed 25 years at the university of Saskatchewan, all of it in the CDC Flax Breeding Program. Her dedication to flax breeding and the UofS was recognized at the Long Service Awards Ceremony in May 2018. Congratulations Shannon!
The CDC Flax Breeding Program, in conjunction with our collaborators at AAFC Saskatoon, AAFC Morden and AAFC Ottawa , were awarded two Agriculture Development Fund grants by the Saskatchewan Ministry of Agriculture. These are to investigate the genes involved in resistance to pasmo, powdery mildew and fusarium wilt and to introduce new germplasm from wild flax species.
Gaofeng Jia and Helen Booker published a paper entitiled "Optimal models in the yield analysis of new flax cultivars" in the Canadian Journal of Plant Sciences. Links to this paper and others can be found in our links section as are more details about our research.
2018 Planting complete!
Planting at Kernen Crops Research Farm is complete thanks to the nice weather in early May. A big thanks to the field crew for their hard work!
New personnel in the lab 2017
Dr. House recently accepted the position of Research Officer and will focus on the development of flax genomics.
Dr. Ragupathy has relocated to Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada (Swift Current) for a Research Scientist position.
Dr. Raju Ragupathy (Professional Research Associate) and Dr Megan House (post-doctoral fellow) and Ms Akshaya Vasudevan (MSc candidate) joined the Flax Breeding Program to work on a project to determine the physiological, genetic and epigenetic causes of early flowering in some mutated flax lines. We are collaborating with Dr Steve Robinson (AAFC-SRC) and Andy Sharpe (NRC-Saskatoon) on this SeCan and NSERC funded project.
Dr Gaofeng Jia was hired in 2016 to work on the Flax Breeding Database project, a collaborative project with Dr Frank You (AAFC-Ottawa) funded by WGRF and SaskFlax. His current focus includes development of a statistical pipeline for estimation of traits of flax breeding lines in multi-environment testing. Dr Jia is continuing the development of the Flax database (FlaxDB), including the Flax Brreding Program's contribution to Genome Canada's DivSeek Canada Initative
MSc students graduated from the CDC Flax Program
Pree's thesis, entitled: "Characterization of Flax Germplasm for Resistance to Fusarium Wilt Caused by Fusarium oxysporum f. sp. lini. " examined wilt reaction in a segregating Recombinant Inbred Line (RIL) population kindly provided by Terre de Lin, France. Pree returned home to Sri Lanka, where she works in the Sri Lanka Institute of Information Technology.
Jia's thesis, entitled "Flowering Time Studies in Canadian Cultivars and 5-Azacytidine Mutants of Oilseed Flax (Linum usitatissimum L.)", examined some interesting early flowering flax mutants and studied the role of daylength on flowering time. Jia is pursuing her PhD in canola breeding at the University of Manitoba.
Kayla's thesis was entitled "Seed Coat Color in Flax (Linum usitatissimum L.) Conditioned by the b1 Locus, its Linkage with Simple Sequence Repeat Markers (SSRs) and its Association with Flower Shape, Flower Color, Fatty Acid Profile and Grain Yield". She screened a population of plants to identify genetic markers associated with a gene responsible for yellow seed coats, as well as looked for associations between and different agronomic traits. Kayla is currently working for Bayer Crop Science.
Tao Zhang developed Structural Equation Models relating crop growth, environment and genotype to yields. His thesis was entitled "Characterizing the Flax Core Collection for Earliness and Canopy Traits". Tao graduated in 2013 and worked for the flax program for a short time. He currently resides in Vancouver.
Dr. Booker visits UWATE University, Japan, December, 2016.
Japanese students visited on an exchange programe with Iwate University, Sep 2014
Seven students from Iwate University, Japan, visited the University of Saskatchewan for three weeks in September 2014. One of the students, Teruki Sugiyama, spent the afternoons working on various projects in the Flax Lab. He tried his hand at PCR, qPCR and digital droplet PCR. He also gained a lot of hands-on experience with flax seed!