Maybell Banting

Researcher
She/Her/Hers
[email protected]
256 Alderman Hall
Shannon Lab
Education

M.S. University of Minnesota, Applied Plant Sciences 2026

Biography

I am a plant genomicist working at the intersection of genome evolution, transcriptomics, and crop improvement. In 2026 I completed my MSc in Applied Plant Sciences (Plant Breeding and Molecular Genetics) at the University of Minnesota, with a thesis on life cycle transcriptomics and genome evolution in Northern Wild Rice.

I am now a researcher in Laura Shannon's lab, working on disease resistance in cultivated potato.

Research

I work on the genetic basis of disease resistance in tetraploid potato. I map QTL for microbiome composition and disease resistance in tetraploid populations contributed by collaborators, analyze AgRenSeq data to link resistance-gene content to disease phenotypes across those panels, and run RNA-seq analyses in tetraploid potato. What ties the three together is polyploidy: with four copies of every chromosome, allele dosage has to be resolved before a marker can be tied to a trait or a transcript to a genotype. Getting that step right is what turns these datasets into something a breeding program can select on.

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