Welcome!
Our research program is Agricultural Experiment Station-mission oriented and centers on how pre- and postharvest environmental factors determine fruit and cereal quality and yield.
Plant sugars and starch provide humans with food, feed, fuel and biomaterials, and quantitatively, are the most important parameter determining fruit postharvest and grain nutritive quality.
Our research, therefore, has the potential to address fundamental questions related to global food security and environmental sustainability.
Our approach is by necessity multidisciplinary and includes biochemistry, molecular biology, transcriptomics, metabolomics, physiology as well as applied physics and chemistry.
The primary crops we study are tomato, rice and wheat, which are of immense economic value.
We have three primary aims:
- To understand how pre- and postharvest environmental factors influence the genes that determine fruit and cereal yield and quality
- To identify genes that control carbon partitioning and allocation in crop plants especially under environmental stress, and
- To investigate and engineer starch crystalline structure.
University of California
Davis, CA 95616
Email: dmbeckles@ucdavis.edu
Tel: (530) 754-4779
Fax: (530) 752-4554
133 Asmundson Hall
