Emilie Barnes

Emile Barnes is a Ph.D. student at the University of Georgia (UGA) studying Plant Breeding, Genetics and Genomics. She is originally from an area just outside of Tallahassee, Florida. Her parents' families both farmed, although she did not grow up on a farm. For her undergraduate degree, she studied Cell and Molecular Biology at New College of Florida. She obtained her master's degree in Biotechnology at the University of South Florida. Barnes chose to study agriculture to help with the goal of feeding the world.

Her bachelor's degree contained a thesis component that lasted one year. The topic was about the cellular and molecular response to the force of gravity in plant cells. She also completed an internship at the University of California – Riverside in 2015. While there she completed basic breeding with Arabidopsis. Then, for her master's degree, she completed a pancreatic cancer project.

As a first-generation college student, pursuing graduate school was not in her original plans. However, she had a few mentors that encouraged her to do so because of her evident passion for science. Barnes chose to attend UGA because of how closely connected the plant sciences departments are to local agriculture. She was drawn to the fact that they devote a lot of research to plants that are not considered large cash crops on the national scale.

Barnes has several different projects that she is working on for her Ph. D. program. One major project involves developing a line of peanut that is resistant to both root-knot nematode, as well as diseases like late leaf spot, early leaf spot, and rust. To accomplish this, she is breeding two separate lines that both have resistance genes introduced by wild peanut relatives. The broader focus of her work involves the use of wild peanut relatives as sources of genetic diversity for desirable traits for growers, specifically disease resistance.

The work she has completed thus far has allowed her to enhance her knowledge from benchwork to the field. Before beginning her Ph.D. program, she knew very little about plant breeding, but now this is something she does every day. Barnes explained that peanut is a unique crop, in the sense that it does not have the same wealth of resources as other crops.

These factors have taught her to become a well-versed breeder and geneticist.

After finishing graduate school, Barnes’ main objective is to discover work that she finds both exciting and challenging. She hopes to work with orphan crops that have the potential to be brought into the modern breeding era through improved genetic resources.

by Caraline Coombs, student assistant, UGA Peanut Team Media