Project Number: 3640-21220-020-17
Project Type: Specific Cooperative Agreement

Start Date: Sep 26, 2008
End Date: May 31, 2009

Objective:
Objective 1: Monitor and characterize races of cereal rust pathogens. The SCA is part of a national monitoring program for Asian soybean rust funded by ARS Headquarters and USB. This project is directly related to our current work on monitoring cereal rust fungi and is an outgrowth of that program. This will be the third year of this program.

Approach:
The goals of this project are to: 1) Establish and monitor three soybean field sites for disease development; 2) analyze air and rain samples for P. pachyrhizi spores using Real-time PCR and microscopy; 3) collect environmental data at each of the three field sites; and 4) collect and analyze air and rain samples from selected additional sites in the U.S.