Overview of the grass family, concentrating on taxonomic issues and identification skills for 200 species (turf, forages, weeds, etc.). Lecture: two hours; laboratory: two hours per week.

This course presents advanced methods and concepts for the commercial production of selected nursery and floriculture crops under field, greenhouse and controlled environments. Field trips for this course may end up to one hour later than the scheduled time due to distances traveled to commercial greenhouse and nursery firms.

Soil microbiology is the study of the macro- and microscopic life in soil: what it is, how it adapts to the soil environment, what it does, and why it is important. This course emphasizes interactions between organisms and their environment and how these interactions affect the world in which we live. Critical thinking skills will be emphasized, particularly the ability to interpret data collected during microbiological investigations of soil.

Methods in Soil Microbiology will be a laboratory course dedicated to introducing upper division students to the methods and techniques used by microbiologists and other soil scientists to examine organisms, interactions, and processes in soil systems. Laboratory, three hours per week.

Each semester five distinguished scientists visit the UK campus to deliver a series of three formal lectures each and participate in numerous informal contacts with graduate students. The emphasis is on the presentation of the most current advances (often unpublished) in selected topics in molecular and cellular genetics. May be repeated to a maximum of six credits.

Critical study of the physiological factors and processes involved in determining economic yield in grain crops. The focus will be on factors operating at the whole plant and plant community level as opposed to physiological processes at the cellular or subcellular level. A logical, analytical description of the process of economic yield production by grain crops will be developed and related to historical changes in crop yields and the potential for increasing yields in the future.

This course will consider the chemical constituents of plants (with emphasis on biologically or nutritionally significant compounds unique to plants), their biosynthesis, contributions to key metabolic and defense processes and the regulation of their synthesis. Included will be discussions of photosynthesis, carbohydrates, lipids, isoprenoids, phenylpropanoids, nitrogen fixation, nitrogen and sulfur reduction and assimilation, alkaloids and additional secondary compound, frontiers in plant biochemistry.

Genomics is reshaping the life sciences, providing high-throughput tools to decipher function of individual genes and to characterize their regulation and interactions. This course will introduce graduate students to most recent advances in the area of plant genetics and genomics. The topics will include structural and functional analysis of plant genomes, genome evolution, application of genomics tools to crop improvement, and basic concepts of bioinformatics.

A physiological/biochemical treatment of central topics in modern plant physiology. Topics will include: plant hormones, an introduction to plant biotechnology, senescence and abscission, stress physiology, phytochrome-photomorphogenesis- phototropism, nitrogen and sulfur metabolism.