#55: Tool Development for Studying Potato Virus Y Infection — Presentation Detail — Celebration of Scholars

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Jun Wang
Kim Instenes
John Kirk
Nora Nickels
Andrew Pustina
James Ripley

#55: Tool Development for Studying Potato Virus Y Infection

Name: Cecilia Curran
Major: Biology
Hometown: Kansas City
Faculty Sponsor: Erin Weber
Other Sponsors:
Type of research: SURE
Funding: SURE

Abstract

Potatoes are the fifth most important crop worldwide. There are many different diseases that can affect the yield and quality of potatoes including viruses which account for 50% potential yield loss worldwide. Potato Virus Y (PVY), a potyvirus with a +-strand RNA genome encoding for eleven proteins, can cause up to 80% of yield loss (Tribodet 2005). PVY has fie naturally occurring strains — two parental strains, PVY O or "ordinary" and PVY N or "necrotic" and three recombinant strains. These five strains have a range of symptoms and infectivity providing a natural system to probe the importance of sequence variation in these viral traits. A better understanding of how the small differences between strains lead to the different infection rates and symptoms among different strains could be informative for the development of resistant cultivars. This work focuses on the development of a synthetic PVY virus system for use in probing the importance of strain-specific variants. In addition to the work verifying the correct assembly of the synthetic virus, I worked to design and clone a recombinant coat protein from PVY N:O into an E. coli plasmid for use in infecting plant tissue with the synthetic PVY construct.

Poster file