Michael Tross

Michael Tross is graduate student on the Integrated Plant Biology track of the Complex Biosystems graduate program at UNL. He joined the lab in the summer of 2020 after rotating in the lab in his first year. He received his Bachelors from Doane University in 2019, where he worked with Tessa Durham Brooks phenotyping maize plants. He hails from the town of Sandy Point, located on the small island of St. Kitts in the Caribbean. He has previously worked as both a lab technician and a high school teacher.

Google Scholar Profile

TA: Laboratory Section of LIFE 120 – Fundamentals of Biology

Recent Publications

Tross MC, Duggan G, Shrestha N, Schnable JC (2024) Models trained to predict differential expression across plant organs identify distal and proximal regulatory regions. doi: 10.1101/2024.06.04.597477 bioRxiv doi: 10.1101/2024.06.04.597477 Preprint
Powadi A, Jubery T, Tross M, Shrestha N, Coffey L, Schnable JC, Schnable PS, Ganapathysubramanian B (2025) Enhancing yield prediction from plot-level satellite imagery through genotype and environment feature disentanglement. Frontiers in Plant Science doi: 10.3389/fpls.2025.1617831
Istipliler D, Tross MC, Bouwens B, Jin H, Yufeng Ge, Yang J, Mural RV, Schnable JC (2025) Heritability, heterosis, and hybrid/inbred classification ability of maize leaf hyperspectral signals under changing soil nitrogen. Crop Science doi: 10.1002/csc2.70073
Shrestha N, Mangal H, Torres-Rodriguez JV, Tross MC, Lopez-Corona L, Linders K, Sun G, Mural RV, Schnable JC (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
Powadi A, Jubery TZ, Tross M, Schnable JC, Ganapathysubramanian B (2024) Disentangling genotype and environment specific latent features for improved trait prediction using a compositional autoencoder. Frontiers in Plant Science doi: 10.3389/fpls.2024.1476070
Ostermann I, Benes B, Gaillard M, Li B, Davis J, Grove RJ, Shrestha N, Tross MC, Schnable JC (2024) Sorghum segmentation and leaf counting using an in silico trained deep neural model. in silico doi: 10.1002/ppj2.70002
Jin H, Tross MC, Tan R, Newton L, Mural RV, Yang J, Thompson AM, Schnable JC (2024) Imitating the "breeder’s eye": predicting grain yield from measurements of non-yield traits. The Plant Phenome Journal doi: 10.1002/ppj2.20102 bioRxiv doi: 10.1101/2023.11.29.568906
Tross MC, Grzybowski M, Jubery TZ, Grove RJ, Nishimwe AV, Torres-Rodriguez JV, Sun G, Ganapathysubramanian B, Ge Y, Schnable JC (2024) Data driven discovery and quantification of hyperspectral leaf reflectance phenotypes across a maize diversity panel. The Plant Phenome Journal doi: 10.1002/ppj2.20106 bioRxiv doi: 10.1101/2023.12.15.571950
Gaillard M, Benes B, Tross MC, Schnable JC (2023) Multi-view triangulation without correspondences. Computers and Electronics in Agriculture doi: 10.1016/j.compag.2023.107688
Mural RV, Sun G, Grzybowski M, Tross MC, Jin H, Smith C, Newton L, Andorf CM, Woodhouse MR, Thompson AM, Sigmon B, Schnable JC (2022) Association mapping across a multitude of traits collected in diverse environments identifies pleiotropic loci in maize. Gigascience doi: 10.1093/gigascience/giac080 bioRxiv doi: 10.1101/2022.02.25.480753
Tross MC, Gaillard M, Zweiner M, Miao C, Grove RJ, Li B, Benes B, Schnable JC (2021) 3D reconstruction identifies loci linked to variation in angle of individual sorghum leaves. PeerJ doi: 10.7717/peerj.12628 bioRxiv doi: 10.1101/2021.06.15.448566