dr. PM (Peter) Bourke

My research focuses on two aspects: developing breeding strategies for diversified cropping systems, and developing tools and methods for breeding in polyploid crops.

Breeding for diversified cropping systems

The benefits of crop diversification are quite clear (e.g. see Beillouin et al's meta-analysis), but it is much less clear how to develop new cultivars or populations for such systems. My research in this area combines quantitative genetics and experimental design principles with ecological theory and stochastic simulation to develop strategies and tools that can deal with the added complication of plant-plant interactions in selection decisions. Part of this research is currently being carried out within the CropXR project.

Tools and methods for polyploid crops

I am the developer and maintainer of two R packages for the genetic analysis of autopolyploids.

• polymapR is an R package to perform linkage mapping in outcrossing autopolyploid F1 populations.
• polyqtlR is an R package that enables QTL mapping in outcrossing autopolyploid F1 populations, while also providing information about meoitic processes in the parents, in particular phenomena such as double reduction, multivalent formation and partial preferential chromosomal pairing.