USDANational Institute of Food & Agriculture

Grant created to fund late blight control

Caused by Phytophthora infestans

Species of Oomycete (water molds)

P. infestans: Late Blight

Irish potato famine of the mid 1800's

Killed 1.5 million Irish

Almost as many left Ireland

Extensively studied by Anton DeBary

Considered one of the fathering diseases of plant pathology

Modern Relevance

Still causes over $6 billion dollars in USA losses alone

Very few effective methods of treatment

Only takes 15 days to decimate a field after noticeable symptoms appear

Requires extensive fungicide use to control

What Is My Project?

Create a smallRNA database for the public

Expanded to include P. sojae, a soy bean pathogen

This database can be used as a tool

– Pathogen control through smallRNAs

smallRNA?

Broad classification of RNAs that cause RNA interference, most frequently through silencing

- Small pieces of RNA bind to target mRNA and block its translation

- Different types have differing levels of complementarity

Recent focus on microRNA

Uses of microRNA

Extremely powerful research tool - Can completely silence an undesired gene

- As this technology develops, fewer off-targets are being affected, leading to a more customizable tool

Disease treatment - Allows drug-induced gene silencing

• miRNA placed in drug which silences a gene necessary for pathogen survival

• Eliminates pathogen!

USDA Goals and My Project

Late blight control is the ultimate goal

Easily accessible smallRNA data will facilitate this control

Other institutions funded by the same grant are focusing more on treatment methods

- They will use the data we have organized

Front End

Data Tables

GBrowseGeneric Genome Browse

Creating miRNA

My Co-worker

Deepthika Ennamuri works on the data-end of the project

- “Back-end”

- Uses Perl scripts to analyze data and get it into a format usable by Gbrowse

Compared to my work:

- “Front-end”

- Make database easily available

Acknowledgments

USDA – National Institute of Food and Agriculture

NSF – Research Experience for Undergraduates

Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) and Kevin Ahern

Coworker: Deepthika Ennamuri

Horticulture Research Crops Laboratory

– Niklaus Grunwald (sponsoring professor)

– Stephanie Bollmann

Center for Genome Research and Biocomputing

– Josh Cuperus

– Christopher Sullivan