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Rod A. Wing

Professor, Plant Science Director, Center for Desert Agriculture

Biological and Environmental Science and Engineering Division 
Center membership :
Center for Desert Agriculture

rod.wing@kaust.edu.sa


Affiliations

Education Profile

  • 1980 B.A. Biochemistry, University of California, Berkeley
  • 1987 Ph.D. Genetics, University of California, Davis
  • 1987-1988 Postdoctoral Research Associate, Plant Gene Expression Center, U.C. Berkeley-USDA/ARS
  • 1988-1990 USDA/ARS Terry Kinney Postdoctoral Fellow, Plant Gene Expression Center, U.C. Berkeley-USDA/ARS
  • 1990-1991 Research Associate, Cornell University, NSF Plant Science Center, Ithaca, NY

Research Interests

Professor Wing's lab focuses on the discovery and utilization of natural variation in the genus Oryza to help solve the 10-billion people question: i.e. "How we feed our world without destroying our world by 2050". At present, the Wing lab is focusing on the generation of Platinum Standard Reference Genomes for cultivated rice and its wild relatives to create a pan-Oryza genome that will serve as a template to create a digital genebank (DGB) for rice. This DGB will be interrogated to discover and analyze essentially all SNP and structural variation that exists across the genus. Such data will be linked with high-throughput phenotyping data derived from a global rice array composed of ~3000 diverse rice accessions planted in multiple locations around the world, over multiple seasons. Such data can then be used to accelerate the breeding of "Green Super Rice" varieties that are adapted to different environmental conditions, including the desert environments of the Middle East. 

Selected Publications

  • Twelve Platinum-Standard Reference Genomes Sequences (PSRefSeq) that complete the full range of genetic diversity of Asian rice, Zhou, Y., D. Chebotarov, D. Kudrna, V. Llaca, S. Lee, S. Rajasekar, N. Mohammed, N. Al-Bader, C. Sobel-Sorenson, P. Parakkal, L.J. Arbelaez, N. Franco, N. Alexandrov, N.R.S. Hamilton, H. Leung, R. Mauleon, M. Lorieux, A. Zuccolo, K. McNally, J. Zhang, R.A. Wing, BioRxiv, 2019. Accepted (2020) in Scientific Data.
  • The Genomics of Oryza Species Provides Insights into Rice Domestication and Heterosis, Chen, E., X. Huang, Z. Tian, R.A. Wing* & B. Han* (*Co-corresponding authors), Annual Review of Plant Biology, 2019, 70:639-665.
  • Rapid evolution of protein diversity by de novo origination in Oryza, Zhang, Li, C. Zhang, Y. Ren, T. Yang, G. Li, A.R. Gschwend, Y. Yu, G. Hou, J. Zi, R. Zhou, B. Wen, J. Zhang, K. Chougule, M. Wang, D. Copetti, G. Jin, J. Chen, Z. Peng, Y. Ouyang, R.A. Wing*, S. Liu*, M. Long* (*Co-corresponding authors), Nature Ecology & Evolution, 2019, 3:679-690.
  • The rice genome revolution: from an ancient grain to Green Super Rice, Wing, R.A, M.D. Purugganan & Q. Zhang, Nature Reviews Genetics, 2018, 19:505-517.
  • Harnessing natural variation across 3,000 rice genomes: SNP discovery, population structure and genome diversity, Wang, W. et. al., Nature, 2018, 557:43-49.