Location: Crop Bioprotection Research
Project Number: 5010-22410-019-000-D
Project Type: In-House Appropriated
Start Date: May 9, 2017
End Date: Mar 1, 2022
Objective:
Objective 1: Develop new microbial culturing and mass production technologies for biocontrol agents and nutritionally fastidious plant pathogens.
Subobjective 1a: Develop new microbial culturing technologies for biocontrol agents.
Subojective 1b: Develop new methodologies for culturing nutritionally fastidious plant pathogens.
Objective 2: Define interactions between biocontrol agents, hosts, and pathogens using traditional and genomic approaches to increase disease management success.
Approach:
Our approach will be to apply technologies allied with the fields of fermentation science, microbial physiology, metabolomics, genomics, and proteomics for two purposes: to enhance the efficacy and shelf-life of the antagonist biomass manufactured and to produce gnotobiotic (i.e., all of a limited number of organisms in a culture are known) or axenic cultures of nutritionally fastidious plant pathogens. More specifically, the shelf-life and efficacy of biocontrol strains will be improved by isolating efficacious stress tolerant variants of a yeast biocontrol agent and then testing the more promising strains isolated in small pilot tests against Fusarium head blight of wheat. Other studies will strive to discover cell production methodologies that promote the production of compounds that enhance cell stress tolerance. Strain transcriptional response to culture conditions will be determined to facilitate optimizing these cell production studies. This will include studies to elucidate the transcriptional response of a yeast biocontrol strain to cold-adaptation that improves cell survival and biocontrol efficacy. Gnotobiotic culturing studies will include establishing a selection of host plants in sterile tissue culture boxes or as callus cell cultures and evaluating methods for infecting these host tissues with axenic propagules of an obligate pathogen. The transcriptional response of gnotobiotic host cell tissue to infection by an obligate plant pathogen will then be determined as a prelude to attempting to grow one or more obligate plant pathogens in axenic culture.
