Aureliano Bombarely

I am a genobotanist seduced by the colorful diversity of plant phenotypes. My research is focused on the study of plant domestication and evolution using genomic approaches such as whole genome sequencing, reduced representation genotyping, RNA-seq and ChIP-Seq. I have been involved in several plant genome sequencing projects such as tomato, watermelon and Nicotiana benthamiana. Currently I am using floral crops from the 18th century such as begonias, florist’s gloxinias and petunias as models to study the link between genomic and phenotypic changes during the plant domestication process. I graduated from the University of Malaga, Spain, in 2001. I obtained my PhD degree from the same university in 2007 studying the ripening process in strawberries. Then I moved to Ithaca, NY, for a first postdoc in the Sol Genomic Network database at the Boyce Thompson Institute (from 2008 to 2012; Bioinformatics in Solanaceae), and a second one in the Department of Plant Biology at Cornell University (from 2012 to 2014; Systematics in Polyploids). I am currently a Translational Genomics Assistant Professor in the Department of Horticulture at Virginia Tech.

March 2016