Peanut genetic improvement by leveraging genomics technologies and computational tools

In the Southeast where interstate rivalries are commonplace, it may seem unusual for an Ohioan to have a dream of pioneering an Alabama crop revolution, but not for HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology Faculty Investigator Josh Clevenger, PhD.

Clevenger, who is a peanut scientist by training, is interested in crop improvement for sustainable agriculture. He is passionate about increasing the diversity of cash crops that are grown in the state of Alabama.

“Historically, Alabama farmers have grown cotton for several hundred years, they began growing peanuts when the boll weevil beetle severely damaged cotton crops, and the remainder of the land is mainly used to grow soybeans, corn, and wheat which aren’t very profitable,” says Clevenger. “In addition, several of the crops that are grown in Alabama were bred for other climates so they do not yield as much as they could elsewhere. The soil in south Alabama is really rich and deserves to be cultivated with crops specifically bred to grow well in Alabama.”

In addition to breeding crops that will flourish in Alabama, Clevenger’s lab also aims to introduce favorable qualities from wild species of crop plants—such as disease and pest resistance—into high-yielding cultivated crops to produce high-yield crops that require the use of fewer pesticides and fungicides.

Because Clevenger’s passion and expertise are in peanut breeding and genomics, his team’s initial focus is incorporating traits from wild species of peanut into cultivated peanut plants that are already widely used. Peanuts struggle with fungal diseases because they are grown in tropical areas where it is very hot and humid. Consequently, peanut farmers must spray fungicides onto peanuts to reduce fungal infection which is very expensive.

By breeding a high-yield peanut plant with a plant that has disease resistance, Clevenger’s lab chooses the disease resistance trait from the wild species in the high-yield cultivated peanut plant. This introduces fungal resistance but maintains the high-yield quality of the cultivated plants. They are using a technique called speed breeding which is essentially exposing the plants to 24 hours of light with no periods of darkness.

“This speeds up the lifecycle from 140 days to 90 days, saving us an average of 50 days with each cross,” says Clevenger. “After three rounds of crossing the peanut plants, we have over a 99.5 percent recovery of the high-yielding plant having the disease resistance segment in it.”
Clevenger’s hope is to bridge the gap between science and nature by more rapidly deploying these beneficial traits into cultivated crops farmers can plant on their land.

Clevenger came to HudsonAlpha in 2020 from Mars-Wrigley’s nut science team. Clevenger earned a PhD from University of Georgia’s Institute for Plant Breeding, Genetics, & Genomics in 2016, a MS in Horticulture and Crop Science from the Ohio State University, and a BS in Biology and Philosophy from Baldwin-Wallace University.