Over the past decade, tremendous progress has been made to advance our understanding of crop genome organization, variation, and evolution, particularly as it relates to potential discovery and exploitation of useful genic or genotypic diversity in plants. Critical to this progress has been advances in molecular biology/genetics, genomics, and computational biology as well as thoughtful applications of the theories of evolutionary biology and plant breeding. It is well recognized that a crop genome is a dynamic unit whose organization and variation has been molded by evolutionary processes and human intervention. 

Dr. Kresovich’s research objectives are: (1) to identify genes of the sorghum, sugar cane, and maize genomes impacting evolution, domestication or crop improvement, (2) to characterize and understand the relationship between DNA sequence variation and desirable phenotypes, (3) to characterize molecular and phenotypic diversity of sorghum, sugar cane, and maize in natural populations, landraces, and elite germplasm, and (4) to develop and test strategies to efficiently discover, conserve, and use variation in natural populations and genebank collections by integrating current advances in genomics, bioinformatics, and plant genetics/breeding.