Lena Wilson is a Ph.D. student in professor Courtney Weber’s lab at Cornell AgriTech, where she focuses on raspberry breeding and genetics. Originally from San Francisco, her path to agricultural science began with a college job at a plant nursery and led her through research roles in Oklahoma and North Carolina. Now, at AgriTech, she’s combining her passion for specialty crops with cutting-edge research to improve berry varieties.
What crops do you research?
I work primarily with raspberry, but especially black raspberry and purple raspberry (a hybrid of red raspberry and black raspberry). I’m working on a few projects right now:
- Profiling the flavor of black and purple raspberry so we can improve the plants but keep the characteristic flavor.
- Investigating the genetic basis of raspberry thorns so we can more easily have thornless plants.
- Working on increasing black raspberry fruit size (since they tend to be small) so it’s faster to pick larger volumes of fruit.
What’s one fascinating thing that most people wouldn’t know about a crop you research?
People might not know that black raspberries are different from blackberries! Although they both have black fruit and they’re related plants (from the same genus, Rubus), you can tell them apart if you know what to look for. Black raspberries have a thimble shape with a hole in the middle once you pull those fruits off the plant, whereas blackberries don’t have that indentation and come off the plant in a more oval shape. If you haven’t compared these fruits, I encourage you to seek them out; they’re both delicious and are likely in season around the time this gets published!
