 Hi, I'm Laura Shannon. I'm an assistant professor in the Horticultural Science Department at the University of Minnesota. My lab studies potato breeding genetics and genomics. And so we sort of have three major goals. The first is to develop a better understanding of potato diversity and genomics. And we do this in service of developing methods to breed potatoes faster. So right now it's a 10 to 12 year process from crossing to release and we're interested in speeding that process up. And then the third thing we do is develop new potato varieties for Minnesota and North Dakota growers. And so I'm going to talk a little bit about sort of the variety of projects we have in all of those areas. So we work at two different field sites. Our first field site is our trial site in Becker, Minnesota. It's sandy and irrigated, which are representative of the environment in the region. And so what we've got there is our breeding program trials. And excitingly for us, so I've been running the breeding program for three years now. So we have our first trials of our own material because we move things into trials in year three. And so we're working on russets and chips and reds and yellows and we've got all of those in trials in Becker. The other thing we have trialing in Becker right now is the North Central Regional trial. We work with Susie in North Dakota and with Jeff Endelman in Wisconsin and with Dave Douches at Michigan State. And we all swap fresh market varieties and trial them so we can trial them in each of the four environments. And so we've got that growing this year too. So that is what we have growing at Becker right now. Our other site is in Grand Rapids, Minnesota. And that is our seed location because we need to be able to produce clean seed. And that's also where we do early generation selection. So the first couple of generations of our breeding program are located there. We grow out about 30,000 single hills every year and we select about 1% of those to continue on. And so this is our third year of doing that. And it's our first time having our own crosses in the field. Other than that, we've been using unselected material from other programs. And again, this is in the sort of four different market classes we're working in. So Russets and Chips and Reds and Yellows. From there, of that material, we select about 1% and then we grow them out in our second year. We grow them out in 12 hills so we get a little more replication. We get a little better sense of whether it's consistent over plants and what's environmental and what's genetic. So we're growing that out this year as well. And of that, we select about 25% to go into year three. And so that was what I was talking about, about the trials at Becker. That's our year three. The other thing we have at Grand Rapids is all of our seed increase. So we need to maintain seed for the breeding program. Another thing we've been working on is we inherited varieties from the previous breeder. And they had a really high disease load. So we cleaned them up in tissue culture using antiviral tissue culture methods over the last couple of years. And we're growing them out in Grand Rapids this year to develop enough seed to be able to evaluate them. And so that project was sponsored by Area 2 and the North Plains Potato Growers Association. The other thing we're developing seed for this year is we have a couple of legacy varieties that don't really fit well in a market class. We've got a really nice purple one. We've got a red skin yellow flesh one that people have known for a long time, tastes good, but they're not particularly, they're having trouble finding their niche, right? So our goal is to grow them out and produce enough seed to trial them with sort of smaller scale growers, farmers market kind of growers, CSA kind of growers, and then chefs, especially in the Twin Cities and see if we can find them a home. And that's a project that's been sponsored by the MDA. The last thing we have growing at Becker right now is I talked about how we're trying to speed up the breeding process. And so one of the things that makes it slow is there's a long time involved in evaluating a clone before we can use it as a parent. Because we have to see whether or not it's got the qualities we're looking for. And we do that by assessing the phenotypes over many, many years. But we're able to predict phenotypes based on genetics. And so we've been working again with this north central group, and we picked a set of chip crosses. So we've got 10 chip crosses, and we're each growing out 200 individuals per cross in these four different locations. And so each place has completely different individuals, and we're all picking our best hundred out of that. And we're going to genotype them all. And then we're going to use an algorithm that we've been working on to estimate what the phenotypes are going to be like. And from that, we can pick what's a promising parent. So we're going from six years from crossing to being able to use something as a parent to, we're going to try to do it in two years. And we're doing it in this multi-environment way so that we can make sure we're not going way off in the wrong direction. So that's what we have going on at Grand Rapids right now. Sort of some of the other major thrusts of the program include we're working on diploid breeding. And so we've been collecting flowers from growers around Minnesota and North Dakota and pollinating them with a diploid inducer to create diploid potatoes to hopefully move toward an inbred hybrid breeding system that will allow us to make changes to varieties faster and respond to changing environmental pressures and respond to changes in consumer demand. So we've been working on that and we've got grad students working on figuring out if there are systematic differences between diploids and tetraploids and working on doing some simulations to determine the best breeding system. We're also working on some kind of large scale diversity studies. We're coming up with a core set of the U.S. Potato Gene Bank using genotyping data to make it so we can screen really fast. We can screen the whole germplasm for desirable traits like disease resistance and then intergress them into especially these new diploids we're creating. But the Gene Bank is huge. So having a representative set really helps us move forward quickly. And so we're developing that. We're part of a team working on sequencing the potato genome in a way where we can distinguish between each of the four chromosomes and that's going to be really new and a really powerful tool for genomic research. So those are sort of the main thrusts we've got going on and like I said what we've been doing is we've been doing some of this really kind of basic science work in the genomics which allows us to work on developing new methods like the genomic selection for picking parents faster and these diploids for just making the whole breeding process faster. And all of this is hopefully in the service of developing new varieties that have increased quality traits and increased resistance to biotic and abiotic stress. Thanks.