In my lab, we characterize population dynamics and spread of fungal plant pathogens using quantitative spatiotemporal epidemiology, population genetics, and whole-genome approaches. We also study how pathogens evolve under stress and how this is related to emergence of fungicide resistance.
The American Phytopathological Society’s annual meeting “Plant Health 2020” is virtual this month, with several lab members presenting their research. Here is a list of their presentations:
Fungicide resistance: Screening and risk-assessment of Rhizoctonia zeae populations in Nebraska Nikita Gambhir, Srikanth Kodati, Anthony Oyegoke Adesemoye and Sydney E. Everhart. Live presentation as part of 19th I.E. Melhus Symposium on Data Driven Plant Health: Friday, August 14, 2020, at 9:00am.
Rapid detection of QoI fungicide resistance in Cercospora sojina and characterization of populations in Nebraska Asha Mane, Tamra A. Jackson-Ziems, Carl A. Bradley, and Sydney E. Everhart. Technical session on Diagnostic Marker Development with live Q&A on: Thursday, August 13, 2020, 11:15am.
Fungicide Sensitivity of Sclerotinia sclerotiorum from Dry Bean and Soybean in the U.S Edgar Humberto Nieto-Lopez, Thomas J.J. Miorini, Martin Chilvers, Loren J. Giesler, Tamra A. Jackson-Ziems, Mehdi Kabbage, Daren S. Mueller, Damon L. Smith, Juan Manuel Tovar-Pedraza, Jaime F. Willbur and Sydney E. Everhart. Poster presentation.
An outbreak of bud blight disease of spruce (Picea spp.) in Alaska: an epidemiological study of Gemmamyces piceae Sergio Manuel Gabriel Peralta, Gerard C. Adams Jr., Loretta Winton, Karel Cerny and Sydney E. Everhart. Poster presentation.
Distribution and population structure of Rhizoctonia zeae in the North Central United States. Nikita Gambhir, Srikanth Kodati, Anthony Oyegoke Adesemoye, Olutoyosi O. Ajayi, Kaitlyn Bissonnette, Carl A. Bradley, Martin Chilvers, Ahmad M. Fakhoury, Tamra A. Jackson-Ziems, Leonor F. S. Leandro, Christopher R. Little1, Dean K. Malvick1, Febina M. Mathew1, Berlin D. Nelson Jr., Gretchen Sassenrath, Damon L. Smith, Darcy E. P. Telenko, Kiersten A. Wise and Sydney E. Everhart. Poster presentation.
Congratulations to Asha for the successful funding of the proposal she co-authored to the Nebraska Soybean Board entitled “Survey and rapid diagnostics for fungicide resistant Frogeye Leaf Spot in Nebraska.”
Our new project proposal to the USDA National Sclerotinia Initiative was also awarded funding, which supports the project that Becky is working on to coordinate our multi-state bean line screening research and Edgar’s research on Sclerotinia sclerotiorum fungicide resistance and population structure.
At the end of this month, we also bid farewell and good luck to Cristian as he leaves to begin his Ph.D. in California.
Dr. Karen Ferreira DaSilva has successfully defended her dissertation this month! This is a major milestone and although the pandemic has limited our ability to celebrate in person, we are all super excited for her achievement and looking forward to celebrating this in person sometime in the future. Congratulations, Karen!
Cristian has completed his UCARE research project and although we could not see him present the poster in person at the UNL Spring Research Fair, he was able to upload the poter onto UNL Digital Commons. His poster is titled, “Fungicides sensitivity of Sclerotinia sclerotiorum isolates from five states with different fungicide treatments.”
After 5 years at the University of Nebraska, I will be starting this fall semester as an associate professor in the Department of Plant Pathology. Special thanks is due to all of the people who I have worked with over the years, this is a huge milestone and I appreciate all of the people who I have collaborated with and interacted along the way.
Several of the Everhart Lab members traveled to the APS Meeting in Cleveland, OH to present our research. Karen was selected to present two talks, including one in the I.E. Melhus Symposium. Margarita presented two posters. Nikita presented two posters and co-taught our Intro R workshop. Srikanth presented a poster of his research. Thomas presented a poster of previous work in my lab and even Edgar had a poster at the meeting. In general, we made our visit to Ohio very productive, forming new relationships, extending our networks, and identifying future potential collaborations.
A big welcome to new Everhart Lab member, Sergio Gabriel-Peralta! Sergio received his bachelor’s in Mexico and his master’s at UNL studying plant viruses. He joins the lab after having been awarded a prestigious CONNACYT fellowship from the Mexican government. Welcome, Sergio!
Congratulations, Julianne, for successfully defending your dissertation! I heard lots of great comments about the quality of your presentation.
Julianne was awarded the Corteva Award to attend the Society of Nematology (SON) Meeting in Raleigh, NC this month. She gave an oral presentation of her research on nematodes in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park and presented a poster of her work on deciphering ecological features within cryptic species, Mesocriconema xenoplax.
The beginning of this month was the conclusion of a summer course that I taught on professional development called Success in the Sciences. This has become a highly rated course and so I will be teaching it again this fall.
In other news, Asha Mane is joiing the Everhart Lab this month. Asha received her bachelor’s and master’s in India and is interested in cutting-edge research in plant pathology. She also comes to us after having several years of lab experience. We will be working together this fall to develop her project plans. Welcome, Asha!
Nikita and I traveled to Knoxville, TN to the University of Tennessee for a joint collaborative visit with Drs. Denita Hadziabdic and Meg Staton. We kicked off a week-long visit by teaching our Intro R workshop and then later, Nikita worked with the Staton lab to learn de novo genome assembly and I worked one-on-one in a data analysis project with Denita.
Good news! I returned from Tennessee to find out that my application for tenure and promotion were officially approved at all of the levels from the department to the Vice Chancellor. When my appointment starts in the fall, it will be as Associate Professor.
Biochemistry undergraduate, Cristian Wolkup-Gil, has joined our lab to gain research experience. He’s writing proposals for a UCARE project and an IANR Undergraduate Research Award to conduct a project on fungicide sensitivity of Sclerotinia sclerotiorum from dry bean fields in the U.S. = The project that I started as part of my USDA-NIFA Postdoctoral fellowship on Phytophthora ramorum was published in mBio this month.
As part of my application for tenure, I delivered a seminar in the Department of Plant Pathology this month that highlighted my research and its impact.
Starting in the spring, Julianne Matcynszyn will join the Everhart Lab to complete her Ph.D., which is on the ecological differnatiation within Mesocriconema xenoplax cryptic species. She comes to our lab after four years in Dr. Tom Powers’ lab. Julianne is targeting August for completion of her dissertation. Welcome, Julianne!
This month, I finalized and submitted my application for early tenure consideraton in the Department of Plant Pathology. Since there is no third year review in our department and no penalty for going up a year early for tenure consideration, I considered this a “no brainer”. In the worst case scenario, this will allow me to gain feedback on what I need to do this year to make a winning application next year.
A new undergraduate student in biochemistry, Olivia Renelt, has joined the Everhart Lab to help out with our fungicide sensitivity assays and molecular genetics projects. Welcome, Olivia!
Invited by the graduate student association in the Department of Plant Pathology and Environmental Microbiology, I traveled to Penn State University to give a departmental seminar, Intro to R Workshop, and chat with the students about time management. It was a whirlwind trip that was amazing!
Several of us took a trip to Boston for the combined meeting of the International Congress of Plant Pathology (ICPP) and the American Phytopathological Society, where one workshop, one talk, and several posters will be presented by members of our group.
Workshop: Intro to R for Plant Pathologists was co-taught with Nikita to >60 attendees
Talk: Nikita gave a presentation in a special session on fungicide resistance to a large audience
We are welcoming two new people to our lab this summer! Callie Braley and Rachel Persson.
Callie is a student in the Doctor of Plant Health program and will be spending time learning about how research on fungicide sensitivity is conducted in the lab. She will also begin a small survey of Nebraska to see if she finds any QoI-resistant isolates of the frogeye leaf spot pathogen Cercospora sojina.
Rachel is an undergraduate student in biochemistry and received funding from the UNL UCARE program to conduct a small study where she will be comparing genotyping results from Dr. Jim Steadman’s lab Sclerotinia sclerotiorum database to genotyping results in our lab in order to determine if genotyping results of the two can be compared and combined.
This summer I’ll be teaching a new course in professional development, entitled Success in the Sciences. The fun part is that this is a coures that I am co-developing wtih two graduate students in the Complex Biosystems program, Kimberley Stanke and Ashley Stengel, with additional guidance on curriculum development and active learning techniques from Dr. Sydney Brown.
Both sad and exciting news that both Zhian and Thomas will be moving on to new postdoctoral positions this month
Zhian will be taking a new postdoctoral researh position in London with Dr. Theobart Jombart, the author of the adegenet R package. Although I am sad to see Zhian go, I am excited for him to gain this new experience!
Thomas is moving north to Carrington, ND to gain tons of field experience working with Michael Wunsch. They will be working together to evaluate fungicide applications for the control of Sclerotinia sclerotiorum diseases in multiple row crops.
Wow! What a month! We submitted three manuscripts in two weeks to Tropical Plant Pathology for the special issue on Sclerotinia research. All of our submitted manuscripts are open and available for comment at PeerJ Preprints:
Pannullo, AP, ZN Kamvar, TJJ Miorini, JR Steadman, and SE Everhart. 2018. Genetic variation and structure of Sclerotinia sclerotiorum populations from soybean in Brazil. PeerJ Preprints
Miorini, TJJ, ZN Kamvar, R Higgins, CG Raetano, JR Steadman, and SE Everhart. 2018. Variation in pathogen aggression and cultivar performance against Sclerotinia sclerotiorum in soybean and dry bean from Brazil and the U.S. PeerJ Preprints
Kamvar, ZN, and SE Everhart. 2018. Something in the agar does not compute: On the discriminatory power of mycelial compatibility in Sclerotinia sclerotiorum. PeerJ Preprints
Becky Higgins of Jim Steadman’s lab and Zhian (pictured right) have their poster ready for the National Sclerotinia Initiative meeting this Wednesday, January 17th in Minneapolis, MN.
Collaborative paper with Dr. Amauri Bogo of Santa Catarina State University in Brazil on two species of Neofabraea causing apple bull’s-eye rot is is now in press and available as a pre-print online! https://doi.org/10.1080/07060661.2017.1421588
Paper in PeerJ now published! Check it out. https://peerj.com/articles/4152/
We submitted a total of five abstracts for the APS-ICPP 2018 meeting, including recent work by Thomas to compare ability of different fungicides to protect flowers from infection by Sclerotinia sclerotiorum ascospores (pictured right).
I was nominated by Dr. Loren Giesler for the UNL Dinsdale Family Faculty Award for pre-tenure faculty with excellence in research, teaching, and/or extension. It was a great opportunity to get my photo taken with both Loren and our IANR Vice Chancellor and plant pathologist, Dr. Mike Boehm.
Our population study of Sclerotinia sclerotiorum populations is now accepted for publication in PeerJ! Congratulations to Zhian and co-authors on this publication!
New undergraduate students, Audrey Vega and Isabel Chavez, are selected to join the Everhart Lab as new lab helpers. Welcome, Audrey and Isabel!
The USDA Women and Minorities in Agricultural STEM program will be funding a project that I co-developed with collaborators Jenny Keshwani, Leah Sandall, Julie Bray-Obermyer, and Deepak Keshwani, to create a mentoring program for youth to connect with career professionals who look like them. Our program is called Cultivate ACCESS and will be launched in the spring of 2018!
We hosted two visiting speakers this month:
Invited by Dr. Anne Dorrance, I taught our Intro to R for Plant Pathologists workshop to ~20 grad students and postdocs located in Wooster and video-linked to Columbus. The following day, I gave a seminar for the department and had a great time meeting students, faculty, and staff.
Our manuscript on the largest population genetic study of Sclerotinia sclerotiorum that were collected over a 10-year period is now out as a PeerJ Preprints and under review at PeerJ.
Jimin Kamvar has joined the Department of Plant Pathology to serve as a Digital Communications Liaison under my supervision. Her work will serve to keep the department website updated. Welcome, Jimin!
I was invited by Dr. Mark Gleason to give a seminar at the Department of Plant Pathology and Microbiology at Iowa State University.
Nikita was selected to receive the 2017-2018 Widaman Distinguished Graduate Assistantship. Congratulations, Nikita!
Invited by Drs. Eduardo Mizubuti and David Jaccoud Filho, I gave two presentations at the 16th International Sclerotinia Workshop in Uberlandia, Brazil. This also included a post-meeting field trip to see agricultural production in the region and my first visit to a coffee plantation (with rust!!).
Edgar, Zhian, Thomas, Nikita, and I are headed to the national APS meeting in San Antonio, TX. Check out our posters if you’re there.
Nikita received the Donald E. Munnecke Student Travel Award from APS to attend the national meeting. Well done!
Farewell to Anthony as he departs the Everhart Lab to begin graduate studies in microbiology at the University of Iowa. Good luck, Anthony!
Welcome to Alex Johnson! Starting in July, Alex will be working in our lab half time as a research assistant.
Edgar, Anthony, and, Nikita each received a travel award to attend the North Central APS meeting in Champaigne, IL. Congratulations on your excellent poster presentations!
Our Intro to R Workshop, co-taught with Dr. Alex Lipka of Univ. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaigne, was a big success at the 2017 North Central APS Meeting. We had more than 20 people coding in R.
Welcome to Dr. Margarita Marroquin-Guzman! Starting June 6th, Margarita will be working in our lab as a postdoctoral scholar on a project to characterize the soybean / covercrop microbiomes with different covercrop rotations. Welcome!
Nikita wins award for her poster presented at the UNL Spring Research Fair – congratulations, Nikita!
Edgar, Nikita, and, Anthony presented posters at the UNL Spring 2017 Research Fair (Edgar, right)
Thomas’ manuscript on the effect of irrigation level for optimal chemigation control of Sclerotinia sclerotiorum is now available online and will appear in April 2017 issue of Crop Protection.
I gave a presentation of our research at the National Sclerotinia Initiative meeting in Minneapolis (right).
Our paper now published and shows sublethal fungicides alter mutation rates and potentially alters genomes: http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0168079
Best of luck to undergraduate students Morgan and Josh as they pursue opportunities more closely related to their future careers.
Sajeewa’s manuscript accepted to PLoS ONE. Congratulations, Sajeewa!
First departmental seminar by Nikita Gambhir entitled “Fungicide Sensitivity: Comparisons of Methods in a Model Plant Pathogen”
Submitted Thomas Miroini’s manuscript on chemigation and white mold control to Crop Protection – cross your fingers!
Group photo taken (L to R): Everhart Lab in the Fall 2016: Anthony Pannullo, Thomas Miorini, Nikita Gambhir, Josh Hanson, Morgan Thompsen, Edgar Nieto, and Sydney Everhart
We submitted two new proposals to the NSB to study soil microbial communities and a collaborative proposal with the Giesler lab to study Sclerotinia sclerotiorum.
Also submitted was a proposal with the Jackson-Ziems lab to gain new knowledge of fungal foliar pathogens of corn.
Let the fun begin!