CSS 2017 & Seed Expo

Katy Rainey
Assistant Professor, Plant Breeding and Genetics
Purdue University


Dr. Katy Martin Rainey is an Assistant Professor Plant Breeding and Genetics in the Department of Agronomy at Purdue University. She studies genetic improvement of soybeans for increased yield and better quality using multidisciplinary approaches. Dr. Rainey focuses on integrating diverse sources of information to demonstrate new approaches to soybean breeding. She collaborates with geneticists, agronomists, economists, engineers, and other soybean breeders in the public and private sectors to do this. Dr. Rainey has been breeding soybeans for 10 years and has released specialty cultivars. For yield improvement, she focuses on dissection of yield into components traits in productive environments. This includes goals to describe new traits associated with yield that can measured using new technologies such as precision and high-throughput phenotyping. She also explores how to predict yield and maximize gain from selection in soybeans using the components of phenotypic variance, high density markers, and mixed models for analyses. For quality improvement, Dr. Rainey is broadly interested in how to modify the commodity paradigm in soybean to create new markets and grow value across the entire value chain. An example of the application of this to her research is using poultry feeding studies to describe metabolizable energy of soybean meal as a new trait that can be phenotyped.

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