Dr. Heuberger’s laboratory studies biochemical diversity in fruits and vegetables, cereals, and pulse crops. The major goals of this research are to characterize the influence of genetic and environmental factors on plant metabolism, and understand how these factors affect health traits of food crops. By identifying the links between plant genetics and metabolism, it is possible to facilitate breeding for food crops with improved biochemical traits, specifically for nutrients and other phytochemicals that affect human health. Additional areas of research include identifying plant metabolites associated with sensory quality in foods, and evaluating the utility of mass spectrometry-based metabolite profiling to facilitate breeding of quality traits in crops. This research integrates techniques in the fields of metabolomics, analytical chemistry, plant breeding and genomics.
