Research
Chris Maliepaard’s research group ‘Quantitative aspects of Plant Breeding’ performs research on quantitative traits in plants, on developing methods and tools for finding genome regions influencing quantitative traits, methods and tools for linkage mapping, QTL analysis and for prediction of and associating quantitative phenotypic traits with other large data sets (molecular markers, metabolite data, protein data, transcription data). The methodology is developed towards a situation where phenotypic traits can be selected for with the aid of molecular markers, also in complex inheritance situations such as occurring in polyploid crops. The use of genomics data and other ~omics data for evaluating quantitative traits in breeding is studied, as well as the use of external data sources (genomics and metabolomics databases, gene annotation databases) in combination with experimental data.
Chris Maliepaard’s research focuses on methodology for linkage analysis, QTL analysis and haplotyping in polyploid crops (potato, cut roses, garden roses, leek, alfalfa, chrysanthemum, Alstroemeria, Begonia, Phalaenopsis), genomic prediction, and linking quantitative traits to ~omics data such as metabolite data.
Teaching
Chris Maliepaard is involved in a number of MSc courses at Wageningen University: Molecular systems biology, Breeding for Stress tolerance and Quality, Modern Statistics for the Life Sciences, Design of Breeding Programs. In addition he is developer, coordinator and moderator in two courses for the online Wageningen University MSc study program Plant Breeding; these are courses on marker-assisted selection, linkage analysis, QTL mapping and quantitative genetics, as well as statistics applied to plant breeding. Dr. Maliepaard supervises MSc Thesis students and is regular (co-)examiner of internship students (MSc) and MSc Thesis students.
Dr. Maliepaard is also involved in regular international company plant breeding courses and in a collaboration between Wageningen University and IVF-CAAS in China.