Professor Joon-Dae Lee (Department of Horticulture) was awarded the 'Korean Society of Breeding Research Award' at the 2022 Joint Scientific Meeting of the Korean Society of Breeding, held recently in Jeju.

At the meeting, Professor Lee received the honor in recognition of the excellence of his research paper, 'Identification of Interspecific and Intraspecific Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms in Papaver spp.,' published in the Korean Society of Breeding's English-language journal Plant Breeding & Biotechnology.

The paper reports a study that searched for interspecific and intraspecific species-specific single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) using three species belonging to the Papaver genus [P. nudicaule (Iceland poppy), P. rhoeas (common poppy), and P. somniferum (opium poppy)], and five cultivars of Iceland poppy with different flower colors that are mainly used as ornamentals. The results are expected to enable molecular-level discrimination between the opium poppy, which contains high levels of narcotic compounds, and the ornamental Iceland poppy and common poppy.

Professor Lee expressed his gratitude, saying he is deeply thankful to Dr. Jae-Hyun Oh (National Institute of Agricultural Sciences), who performed the experiments, and to Seon-hwa Bae, a doctoral student in the Department of Horticulture, who worked hard on preparing the manuscript.

Meanwhile, Professor Lee's research team is actively conducting research on developing molecular markers associated with important horticultural traits (such as disease resistance and male sterility) in a variety of horticultural crops (peppers, paprika, grapes, onions, strawberries, etc.).