Mirielle Sherman leaned over her scientific poster, making a few final adjustments before presenting her work at Cornell AgriTech’s Summer Research Scholars symposium in July.
Photographs of grapevines covered the poster. Some showed cameras mounted inside a greenhouse; others captured grapevine buds at different stages of development. For Sherman, each image represented hours of careful analysis and a small piece of a much larger plant breeding puzzle.
“One of my big jobs was annotating all of these images according to a scale that we developed,” Sherman said.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison undergraduate had spent the summer in assistant professor Maddy Oravec’s grape breeding and genetics lab, where she worked under the mentorship of plant breeding Ph.D. student Aidan Inoue. Her project focused on tracking grapevine bud development and understanding how vulnerable buds are to late spring frosts.
The stakes are high for grape growers. As buds develop, they become increasingly susceptible to frost damage, which can reduce yields and affect vineyard productivity.
“The goal is to eventually use the data from from the research to help match budbreak timing and make breeding selections based on plants that have later budbreak,” Sherman said. “This scale is based on how much damage would occur to the bud if there was a late frost.”
