Research

Jianming Yu is Professor and Pioneer Distinguished Chair in Maize Breeding in the Department of Agronomy, Iowa State University. The focus of Yu’s program is to address significant questions in plant breeding by combining cutting-edge genomic technologies and quantitative genetics theories. He is internationally recognized as a go-to person in the interface of quantitative genetics, genomics, plant breeding, and statistics.

In 2019, Yu’s program developed several optimal training set design methods for genomic selection in hybrid crops (Molecular Plant 12:390-401). Identifying the superior hybrids among the immense number of possible combinations of parental inbreds is a long-standing challenge. By viewing plant breeding as a process of genetic space exploration, data mining and design thinking would help reshape the next generation breeding programs. In the same year, Yu’s research team also uncovered the first case of domestication triangle, in which human genetics interact with sorghum genetics and the environment to influence the proportion of tannin sorghums farmers grown in different parts of Africa (Nature Plants 5:1229-1236). Crop domestication is a complex process of dynamically balancing two competing forces: artificial selection and natural selection. This discovery could help uncover future cases. In addition, by examining how the process of domestication have affected the genomes of corn and soybean, the team found out that the [AT]-increase is more pronounced in genomic regions that are non-genic, pericentromeric, transposable elements; methylated; and with low recombination (Genome Biology 20:74). These findings established the critical links among UV radiation, mutation, DNA repair, methylation, and genome evolution.

In 2018, Yu’s program developed an integrated framework for gene discovery underlying phenotypic plasticity and performance prediction across environments (PNAS 115:6679-6683). This work was regarded as a landmark paper in genotype-by-environment interaction, phenotypic plasticity, and norm of reaction. In 2016, Yu’s team demonstrated that a comprehensive strategy based on genomic selection and other relevant technologies can be designed to mine the natural heritage stored in numerous gene banks (Nature Plants 2:16150). In 2015, his research team published a complete case of heterosis due to pseudo-overdominance (PNAS 112:11823-11828). In 2012, his team identified the Shattering1 gene and its homologs underlying the parallel domestication of multiple cereal species (Nature Genetics 44:720-724), quantified genic and nongenic contributions to quantitative trait variation in maize (Genome Research 22:2436-2444), and cloned the Tan1 gene in sorghum underlying a trait with incomplete domestication (PNAS 109:10281-10286). In addition, his team revealed the patterns in DNA base composition divergence (Nucleic Acids Research 43:3614-3625) in 2015, and chromosome size variation (Molecular Biology and Evolution 28:1901-1911) across multiple species in 2011.

Yu's significant research contributions also include pioneering genomic selection (GS) research in crops (Crop Science 47:1082-1090), the state-of-the-art breeding methodology that has been extensively implemented in major breeding companies; outlining the nested association mapping (NAM) strategy (Genetics 138:539-551), the approach that has been replicated in multiple crops to combine the strengths of linkage mapping using populations derived from bi-parental crosses and linkage disequilibrium mapping (association mapping) using diverse accessions; and developing the mixed model method for genome-wide association studies (GWAS) (Nature Genetics 38:203-208), the standard method framework for complex trait dissection that is widely adopted in plant and human genetics.

Yu received the Iowa State University Mid-Career Achievement in Research Award in 2017, the Emerging Leaders in Applied Plant Sciences Award from University of Minnesota in 2014, and the Young Crop Scientist Award from Crop Science Society of America (CSSA) in 2010. Yu was elected to Fellow of CSSA in 2018, and Fellow of American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2018.