ISU Researchers Sequence Genome of a Soybean Fungus Responsible for Sudden Death Syndrome

Researchers at Iowa State University have generated a draft genome sequence of Fusarium virguliforme, a pathogen that causes sudden death syndrome (SDS) in soybeans.

Madan Bhattacharyya, an associate professor of agronomy leading the research team, said the genome sequence generated for the research community will expedite efforts towards discovering mechanisms this pathogen uses to cause disease, and will ultimately lead to soybeans with improved SDS resistance.

“We’ve just drawn the roadmap so that researchers can do their work in an efficient way. This is a resource for them to avoid doing all the hard experiments that took us more than six months. Now we can do the same work in less than a week,” Bhattacharyya said. “There is so much known about pathogens similar to our SDS pathogen, we can use that information to quickly determine if it is applicable to our pathogen.”

This and all other Iowa State University College of Agriculture and Life Sciences news releases and related photos are available at http://www.cals.iastate.edu/news/