| | Cereal Disease Lab |  | | | | The Cereal Disease Lab is a research facility of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Research Service and is associated with the Department of Plant Pathology on the St. Paul Campus. The facility consists of an integrated unit housing offices, laboratories, plant growth chambers, headhouse, and greenhouses. These facilities are equipped for molecular biology research, as well as, for support of field and greenhouse oriented research. The building includes two molecular biology and molecular genetics laboratories with equipment for DNA sequencing, RFLP analysis, and PCR work with RAPDs and AFLPs. There is also a microscopy room equipped for fluorescence microscopy and video image analysis. The Cereal Disease Lab is designed especially for research with obligate plant parasites such as rust and powdery mildew fungi that must be cultured on living host plants. Greenhouses and inoculating equipment are devoted mainly to work with cereal plants. The facilities include a culture collection of several thousand isolates of rust fungi in 41 different species of 15 rust genera stored in liquid nitrogen. There is also a controlled environment seed storage room with stocks of over 1600 lines of wheat, other small grain crops, and related grass species. The Cereal Disease Lab has a small library of publications on rust diseases and cereal crops and maintains a bibliography file with approximately 12,000 citations of publications on rusts of small grains. |
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