Project Number: 1275-21220-221-18
Project Type: Specific Cooperative Agreement

Start Date: Feb 01, 2007
End Date: Sep 30, 2008

Objective:
Construct databases of tandem mass spectra from plant pathogens and design strategy and software applications to search databases and identify soybean plant pathogens based on matches to spectra in the databases.

Approach:
Mass spectrometry data that has been collected for several plant pathogens will be organized in a searchable database. Tasks will include ensuring that spectra are unique biomarkers for the pathogen from which they were derived. Tandem mass spectra from real samples will be compared to those in the database so that the pathogen in the sample can be identified. Research topics include monitoring false positive identifications; using statistics or probability to define the quality of a match or measure the confidence for pathogen identification; and designing a work-flow for software and analysis.