It’s been a week since plants were inoculated as part of an exercise to identify three maize viruses. Participants evaluated symptoms on inoculated plants and conducted tissue blot immunoassays (TBIAs). After setting up the TBIAs, they worked with Dr. Fiorella Cisneros-Carter and Tea Meulia to search for virus particles in leaf dips from inoculated maize plants by transmission electron microscopy.
In the afternoon, participants completed the TBIAs and finalized virus identification in their unknowns. Some extra time in the afternoon was allotted to practice sequence alignment and BLAST searches for pathogen/pest identification using available software. They also purified internal transcribed ribosomal DNA amplified last week from DNA extracted in Ghana from a putative Choanephora cucurbitarum isolate. The purified DNA was submitted to the OSU-OARDC Molecular and Cellular Imaging Center (MCIC) for sequencing.
