Fargo, N.D. –– NDSU plant sciences doctoral candidate Samira Mafi Moghaddam wrote a paper that is one of the most viewed research papers in the journal Frontiers in Plant Science.

The paper is titled “Developing Market Class Specific InDel Markers from Next Generation Sequence Data in Phaseolus vulgaris L.” The paper was a result of research conducted by Mafi Moghaddam in collaboration with a national team of researchers as part of the USDA Common Bean Coordinated Agricultural Project.

Phil McClean, director of the genomics and bioinformatics program and professor in dry bean genetics in the NDSU Department of Plant Sciences, is Mafi Moghaddam's graduate program adviser.

Next-generation sequence data provides valuable information and tools for genetic and genomic research and offers insights that can be applied to marker development. Through the group’s research, a new collection of approximately 3,000 insertion-deletion, known as InDel, markers were developed by mining a large set of sequence data for 14 varieties of common bean. This genome-wide set of markers are inexpensive and of great use for international breeding programs with limited budgets.

Collaborative researchers and contributing authors on the paper included Sujan Mamidi, Rian Lee and Juan Osorno, NDSU Department of Plant Sciences; Qijian Song and Perry Cregan, Soybean Genomics and Improvement Laboratory, USDA-ARS, Beltsville, Maryland; and Jeremy Schmutz, HudsonAlpha Institute, Huntsville, Alabama.

Because of the high viewership of the article, the paper was featured in the “Frontiers Top 10 Most Viewed Plant Science Research Articles” blog post. The paper can be viewed at http://journal.frontiersin.org/Journal/10.3389/fpls.2014.00185/abstract.

NDSU is recognized as one of the nation's top 108 public and private universities by the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education.