Li Danqing, a Ph.D. candidate of Institute of Landscape Architecture, went to Auburn University, which is located in the southeast of the US for a joint study from Nov.25, 2016 to Nov. 29, 2017. Auburn University is one of the top 100 traditional universities in the US, especially in the field of agriculture and biological research. It has many advanced instruments that can be applied to the field of life science, such as supercomputers, new generation sequencing platforms, etc.
Li Danqing studied in the laboratory of Prof. Scott McElroy. Dr. McElroy focuses on weed science, especially herbicide resistance. There is not only mature biological information analysis system, but also the local workstation and the remote server for efficient transcriptome and genome data analysis in this lab. Besides, this lab provides the platform for molecular experiment, one-stop complete DNA extraction and amplification, SNP verification analysis, real-time sequencing and so on. At present, Dr. McElroy's team has completed transcriptome sequencing and analysis of more than 10 weed species and Goosegrass whole genome sequencing and analysis, and constructs a weed gene database.
In addition to the bioinformatics learning, Danqing visited several leading universities and institutions in the field of horticulture with Professor Xia Yiping, including Cornell University, University of Georgia, Iowa State University, and the USDA institute in Fargo. Through the visiting, they have established relations of cooperative research. In Sep. 2017, Danqing attended 2017 ASHS annual conference and gave a presentation. She shared the progress of research on evergreen and deciduous iris plants for the first time at an international conference. In addition, Danqing went to USDA institute in Fargo and studied at the laboratory of Dr. Horvath for a month. Dr. Horvath focuses on dormancy research of perennials for a long time.
Through a year of joint study, Li Danqing not only learned advanced data analysis and experimental technology, but also improved her English expression ability, broadened horizons and trained scientific thinking.
