The Hans Hartwig Ruthenberg Graduate Award is usually given to promising young scientists working towards improving farming systems and alleviating hunger. This year Ulrike and Sarah were honored.

Ulrike Beukert

How will we meet the rising demand of rice in future owing to the growing population? For a long time, plant breeding has been the popular answer to this question. However in most cases, the yield remains stagnant. The high expense incurred by the current current approach is a huge challenge. Ulrike Beukert, Plant Breeding student from Martin-Luther-University of Halle-Wittenberg has a new approach on rice breeding. Her reserach on “Genome-based identification of heterotic patterns in rice,” used only a small selection of hybrid to predict the entire parent-line. Biostatistic analysis of yield and gene marker data helped her increase the prediction acurracy and improve yield.