Project Number: 1931-21000-016-03
Project Type: Reimbursable

Start Date: Jun 01, 2005
End Date: Aug 31, 2009

Objective:
The goal of this project is to use functional genomics to characterize the response of apple to fire blight disease and thereby identify new opportunities for improving fire blight resistance. Specifically, the project will: 1) characterize expressed sequence tags (ESTs) associated with the apple's response to the fire blight challenge, and 2) develop a high-throughput system for generating RNAi mutants in apple using ESTs associated with fire blight development.

Approach:
A fire blight-susceptible and -resistant apple cultivar will be challenged with the fire blight pathogen, Erwinia Amylovora, and global approaches will be used to characterize the transcriptome of the two cultivars. A similar approach will be used to investigate the basis for susceptibility by challenging the susceptible cultivar with an incompatible pathogen, E. amylovora, and defined mutants of the pathogen altered in their ability to secrete 'effector' proteins (that are believed to elicit disease development) into host cells. High-throughput approaches will be developed to allow large scale reverse genetic analysis of a large pool of ESTs with the use of RNAi technology.