Location: Crop Production and Pest Control Research
Project Number: 5020-21220-014-024-S
Project Type: Non-Assistance Cooperative Agreement
Start Date: Aug 1, 2024
End Date: Jul 31, 2026
Objective:
1. Identify candidate genes in the fungi that might be involved in pathogenicity or other biologically interesting traits through RNA sequencing or other methods.
2. Perform functional analyses by making knockout mutants or other approaches as appropriate.
3. Analyze microbiomes of corn leaves from Central and South America compared to those from the U.S.
4. Isolate fungi from infected corn leaves for identification and additional analyses as needed.
5. Identify variations among samples from infected corn leaves for phylogeographic analysis of the tar spot pathogen.
Approach:
Cooperator will obtain isolates of the relevant pathogens as needed and use bioinformatics and other analyses to identify interesting genes for functional analyses through generating knockout mutants or by using CRISPR. Samples of infected corn leaves will be obtained from Ecuador, Guatemala and other countries as possible, and their microbiomes sequenced for comparison with samples in the U.S. Isolates of culturable fungal species will be obtained from corn leaves and identified to likely species through morphological and molecular means. Followup work will depend on the species identified, but could include testing for Koch's postulates, developing reference genomic sequences and inoculations onto corn plants. Several hundred tar spot samples from the Americas will be sequenced and the data used in phylogeographic analyses to identify the likely source of recent migrations of the tar spot pathogen into the U.S.
