Here is the presentation I will deliver at the 17th Congress for the International Society for Molecular Plant-Microbe Interactions (17-21 July, 2016) at the Oregon Convention Center, Portland, Oregon.
Please click on the first slide and then cycle through.
I will also be presenting a more focused poster on the citizen science scheme.
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- A strong opening slide, helped by the University of Reading template. https://www.reading.ac.uk/dps/visualidentity/dps2-visualidentity-templatesdownload.aspx
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- Every presentation needs an outline: now you know what’s coming.
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- Powdery mildews (Erysiphales) are an order within the most speciose clade of Fungi: Ascomycota.
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- The diversity of powdery mildews.
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- The vast majority of powdery mildew research is done on just one of the 860 different species.
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- Grape powdery mildew is the next most studied.
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- There are many other species occuring on many other plants…
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- …in fact it occurs on 10,000 different plant species.
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- The citizen science scheme aims to share knowledge with the public and gather a greater diversity of samples. https://blogs.reading.ac.uk/crg/powdery-mildew-survey-2016/
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- Each sample is identified using established techniques. The Taxonomic Manual is useful for morphological identification. It is my aim to complement these techniques in order to identify the species more accurately and efficiently.
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- Sexual spores are useful for species identification but are not as common as…
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- …asexual spores, whose features also help to identify a species.
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- The flow of molecular techniques used for identification of samples. The internal transcribed spacer (ITS) region is the accepted molecular region for this process.
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- Samples have come from all over the UK. Identification techniques have worked but leave scope for improvement.
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- The ITS region is useful for analyses of how closely related different species are but still leaves ambiguities.
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- ITS is not always able to differentiate between different species.
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- The ‘barcoding’ of life has become common in all sections of the tree of life. We can take these practises…
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- …as well as those used in other orders of Fungi, and use apply them to powdery mildew identification.
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- Regions chosen to investigate were prompted by those used in other fungal studies.
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- Plenty of my experiments have led to false-positive results. Here one of the many microfungi found in our environmental samples was sequenced instead of the desired powdery mildew.
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- To overcome this issue primers specific to powdery mildews were made.
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- The DNA sequences generated during the project show the level of variability between different regions of the powdery mildew genome.
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- The actin region gives good separation of closely related species.
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- The β-tubulin region has also proved useful; grouping species as expected.
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- The Mcm7 region offers great resolution across all the powdery mildews.
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- Our new record of powdery mildew on Heuchera deserves a mention. http://ndrs.org.uk/article.php?id=033023
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- More work to come.
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