With applications ranging from textiles to health foods to fuel, the hemp industry in the United States is booming. To keep up with the rapidly growing demand for seeds, hemp breeders and seed technicians are highly sought after, and significant growth in employment opportunities is expected to continue into the next decade.
This certificate program will cover the essential elements of starting a successful hemp breeding program. You will gain a deeper understanding of plant genetics and how they are applied to crop improvement. By combining both traditional and modern breeding techniques, you will design a plan to produce a crop with a desired combination of traits to help your plant succeed in a particular environment. From there, you will discover how to evaluate the success of a breeding trial — a process that is particularly complex when tracking and evaluating multiple traits of interest.
As you gain a deeper understanding of plant intellectual property law, you will also plan how to appropriately protect your new variety. To complete your certificate, you can choose the focus area most relevant to you and your personal or professional needs, including food product development, entrepreneurship, or business management. By the completion of the program, you will have acquired a strong foundation in hemp genetics and be ready to create an effective breeding program.
Cannabis and Hemp Genetics :
How do genes get passed between generations? What is the relationship between the environment plants live in and their genetic makeup? In this course, you will gain an understanding of how plant characteristics are passed between generations by concluding plant genetics based on both trait observation and genetic data. You will apply the rules of genetics to determine whether a trait arises from a single gene or multiple genes. Since hemp is a field crop, it is also important to consider the interactions between genetics and the environment. You will discover how to determine whether plant traits vary because the plants have different genes or because they were grown in different environments.
Cannabis and Hemp Breeding and Selection:
In this course, you will examine the variety of breeding methods and breeding schemes available to help you alter the traits of your hemp crop. Each of these techniques has particular applications as well as benefits and drawbacks, so it is critical to understand when each technique is most appropriate. Once you have mastered the application of these techniques, you'll develop a potential breeding plan that is focused on a single trait of interest. In the real world, your lineage will likely need improvement in multiple connected traits, so you will explore different techniques to achieve this more complex goal. Finally, once a breeding trial has been done, you'll need to evaluate whether or not it is successful. As part of this course, you will use actual data provided by BioX researchers to evaluate whether or not their breeding trial worked.
You are required to have completed the following courses or have equivalent experience before taking this course:
Cannabis and Hemp Gene Editing and Selection:
In some cases, a trait of interest does not exist or is not easily available to the breeder. In this course, you will analyze how new genetic engineering and genome editing technologies can be applied to hemp breeding. Understanding when and how to use new genetic technologies is essential for a modern plant breeder. You will examine these new technologies — one of which, the gene gun, was invented at University — and practice applying them to hemp breeding. Creating a new hemp variety is a lot of work, and as a breeder, you'll want to protect your investment with the appropriate intellectual property (IP) protections. As this course concludes, you will compare the different classes of IP protections and evaluate how they can best be used to protect different types of breeding results.
You are required to have completed the following courses or have equivalent experience before taking this course:
Food Product Development Elective Track:
Entrepreneurship Elective Track:
Business Management Elective Track:
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