BYU professor wins cotton biotech award

Josh Udall recognized for work developing bioinformatics tools to understand cotton genome.

Josh Udall of Brigham Young University (BYU) has been awarded the 2014 Cotton Biotechnology Award for his work developing bioinformatics tools (methods and software) to help understand the cotton genome. The award was presented by Cotton Inc., which funds Udall’s research, at the International Cotton Genome Initiative (ICGI) workshop held at the recent Plant and Animal Genome Conference in San Diego, Calif.

Award recipients complete outstanding biotechnology research in cotton and are selected from a committee comprising a previous recipient and representatives from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, a private seed company and a university.

Udall, the fifth recipient of the award, also has won a National Science Foundation Plant Genome Program grant. He was cited for surfacing a software pipeline that addresses genome annotation, SNP index creation and analysis of the genotyping by sequencing (GBS) data. The data is currently being generated into the cotton Nested Association Mapping (NAM) population efforts. Udall’s data analysis includes such software developments as PolyCat, PolyDog and BamBam.

Source: Cotton Inc.