Project Number: 6602-21220-014-01
Project Type: Specific Cooperative Agreement

Start Date: May 22, 2008
End Date: May 30, 2009

Objective:
One of our nation's top priorities in agriculture is to develop sustainable and environmentally benign methods of crop protection. Because of their safety and specificity, crop varieties with resistance to multiple key pests of a give crop can help to achieve this goal. Breeding for multiple resistance requires definition of the crop genes that confer resistance or susceptibility to key insect pests. The specific objective of this cooperative project is to reveal, using microarray, differentially-expressed maize defense genes among insect-resistant and -susceptible germplasm in response to corn earworm and fall armyworm feeding.

Approach:
The maize plants will be infested at the 6-leaf stage, and insect damage will be rated for severity of foliage consumption. The infested and control plants will be sampled and flash-frozen in liquid nitrogen, and maintained in -80 °C for subsequent microarray hybridization. Each hybridized maize array will be scanned and quantified to generate an image file and a data file for each array. All image and data files will be uploaded into GeneTraffic software for background subtraction, normalization, cluster and significance analyses to identify differentially-expressed genes across maize germplasm and insect pest species. The information (i.e., maize defense transcriptomes) obtained will be crucial for developing multiple insect-resistant corn germplasm to improve corn yield and reduce aflatoxin and other mycotoxin contaminations.