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Dan  Milbourne 

Research Officer

Research Interests

My main area of interest is developing routes for the application of molecular genetics and genomics-based approaches as selection tools in conventional plant breeding.


I have a long standing interest in potato breeding, and currently work in collaboration with the potato breeding programme run by Dr Denis Griffin to develop genetic markers for disease resistance, which we now routinely deploy for selection within the programme.

I also work on forage species, and am currently involved in projects with Dr Susanne Barth and staff from the Grasslands Research Programme to develop routes for deploying approaches such as genomic selection in perennial ryegrass breeding.

The feasibility of biotechnology-based methods in plant breeding is frequently limited by the availability of genome-based resources for the species in question, and developing these resources is another of my research interests. My group was involved in the international initiative to sequence the potato genome (www.potatogenome.net), and I’m currently involved (with Dr Susanne Barth) in developing similar resources in perennial ryegrass and white clover.

  • The Potato Genome Sequencing Consortium* (2011) Genome sequence and analysis of the tuber crop potato Nature Vol 475; 189-197 (*incl. Teagasc authors Marialaura Destefanis, Istvan Nagy and Dan Milbourne)
  • Claire Moloney, Denis Griffin, Peter W. Jones, Glenn J. Bryan, Karen McLean, John E. Bradshaw, Dan Milbourne (2010) Development of diagnostic markers for use in breeding potatoes resistant to Globodera pallida pathotype Pa2/3 using germplasm derived from Solanum tuberosum ssp. andigena CPC 2802 TAG, Volume 120, Number 3, 679-689
  • Nora M. Casey, Dan Milbourne, Susanne Barth, Melanie Febrer, Glyn Jenkins, Michael T. Abberton, Charlotte Jones and Daniel Thorogood (2010) The genetic location of the self-incompatibility locus in white clover (Trifolium repens L.) TAG Volume 121, Number 3, 567-576
  • Stephen Byrne, Emma Guiney, Susanne Barth, Iain Donnison, Luis A. J. Mur, Dan Milbourne (2009) Identification of coincident QTL for days to heading, spike length and spikelets per spike in Lolium perenne L. Euphytica , Volume 166, Number 1, 61-70,
  • Melanie Febrer, Foo Cheung,; Christopher D Town, Steven B Cannon, Nevin D Young, Michael T Abberton, Glyn Jenkins, Dan Milbourne (2007) Construction, characterization, and preliminary BAC-end sequencing analysis of a bacterial artificial chromosome library of white clover (Trifolium repens L.) Genome, Volume 50, Number 4, pp. 412-421
  • Dan Milbourne, Barnaly Pande and Glenn J. Bryan Chapter 12 - Potato: in Genome Mapping and Molecular Breeding in Plants (Ed. C. Kole), 2007, Volume 3, Pulses, Sugar and Tuber Crops, pp. 205-236, Springer.
  • Construction of a 10,000-Marker Ultradense Genetic Recombination Map of Potato:
    Hans van Os, Sandra Andrzejewski, Erin Bakker, Imanol Barrena, Glenn J. Bryan, Bernard Caromel, Bilal Ghareeb, Edwige Isidore, Walter de Jong, Paul van Koer, Véronique Lefebvre, Dan Milbourne, Enrique Ritter, Jeroen N. A. M. Rouppe van der Voort, Françoise Rousselle-Bourgeois, Joke van Vliet, Robbie Waugh, Richard G. F. Visser, Jaap Bakker and Herman J. van Eck (2006) Providing a Framework for Accelerated Gene Isolation and a Genomewide Physical Map. Genetics, vol. 173, no. 2, 1075-1087
  • Jie Kang
  • Lea Vexler