Margaret Pallotta

Margie is currently working on gene discovery projects in the hybrid wheat research area. More broadly, she is interested in genetic variation, adaptation and impediments to recombination in cereal crops.
Margie has an undergraduate degree in Science (University of Adelaide). She commenced work at The University of Adelaide working on cereal cytogenetics projects as well as wheat/rye hybrid production and triticale breeding. She moved to Canberra to work at CSIRO Plant Industry investigating the nature of somaclonal variation in wheat. After a return to Adelaide, Margie worked with several groups on trait mapping in cereals, and development of molecular markers for deployment in breeding programs, Margie joined ACPFG in 2004 and has worked on numerous gene analysis projects as well as characterisation of a barley transposon-tagged population and, more recently, understanding the genetic basis for boron toxicity tolerance in wheat. She also has worked on genetic aspects of various other cereal traits such as resistance to late-maturity alpha-amylase production in wheat, manganese efficiency in barley and boron tolerance in barley.