Recent Research Projects
Soil Studies
2022-2023: Melanie Medina, a graduate student at the department of plant pathology at OSU, is performing a study under the supervision of Dr. Soledad Benitez. This project focuses on the effect of fungal communities from soil on soybean cyst nematode infestation in a greenhouse experiment. She takes soils from fields with different weed management and compares the potential of their fungal communities in influencing the infection potential of the nematode. While she has used soil from various fields with agricultural weed management, she also uses soil from the prairie as it has a high diversity of plants and in turn fungi. It allows her to see differences in how the nematode responds to fungal communities that are assembled in the absence of their primary host. Some results from the earlier phase of study show that soybeans planted on growth media amended with prairie soil had significantly higher root biomass when compared with two out of the other three soil treatments which were from agricultural production fields. This effect held true regardless of SCN inoculation. The second round of tests includes autoclaving of the field soils as a factor to determine if the microbes of the soil are the primary drivers of this effect.