Kyle Linders
Undergraduate & MS Student (co-advised with Brandi Sigmon)
Kyle Linders joined the Schnable Lab in 2020 as an undergraduate assistant and moved into the Integrated Plant Biology M.S. program in 2021 under Brandi Sigmon, where he studied the quantitative genetics of sorghum panicle architecture. He completed the degree in 2023 and continued as a Research Technologist I supporting maize and sorghum genetics field experiments for the group through the summer of 2025.
Kyle holds a B.S. in Plant Biology (Biotechnology) and an M.S. in Agronomy (Plant Breeding and Genetics), both from UNL, and now serves as a Research Agronomist with PivotBio. He brings expertise in protocol development and has implemented quality control procedures to ensure consistent, high-quality datasets are provided for genomic/transcriptomic analyses. His contributions have strengthened multi-environment trials and supported ongoing efforts to identify genetic variants associated with key agronomic traits.
Recent Publications
- (2025) MaizeEar-SAM: Zero-shot maize ear phenotyping. arXiv doi: 10.48550/arXiv.2502.13399 Preprint
- (2025) Assessing the impact of yield plasticity on hybrid performance in maize. Physiologia Plantarum doi: 10.1111/ppl.70278 bioRxiv doi: 10.1101/2025.01.21.634104
- (2025) Genes and pathways determining flowering time variation in temperate adapted sorghum. The Plant Journal doi: 10.1111/tpj.70250 bioRxiv doi: 10.1101/2024.12.12.628249
- (2025) Off-the-shelf image analysis models outperform human visual assessment in identifying genes controlling seed color variation in sorghum. The Plant Phenome Journal doi: 10.1002/ppj2.70013 bioRxiv doi: 10.1101/2024.07.22.604683
- (2024) Variation in leaf chlorophyll concentration in response to nitrogen application across maize hybrids in contrasting environments. microPublication Biology doi: 10.17912/micropub.biology.001115