Professor Dr Christian Jung

Christian Jung is a plant breeder who has been working on phenotypic and genotypic variation of crop plants since the early days of genomic research in the 1980s. He has identified a number of agronomically important genes by genetic mapping and he has cloned the first gene for resistance against plant parasitic nematodes in 1997. He has worked on the molecular reasons of sex dimorphism in crop plants and he has mapped a number of disease resistance genes in different crops such as barley, oilseed rape and sugar beet. Since the early 1990s, he has been working on flowering time regulation in crops. The onset of flowering is an important switch in the lifetime of a plant.
Recently, He has initiated a network of flowering time research across species borders. The most prominent gene cloned in his lab is the long sought bolting time gene from sugar beet which is one of the most important domestication genes turning a wild species into a crop. Beyond natural variation he is also working on targeted modification of agronomically important genes by genetic engineering. He is producing plant prototypes with altered phenological development such as a winter sugar beet which can be sown before winter.