Posted: July 24, 2017
Northeast SARE awards Laura del Sol Bautista Jalón a 2017 Graduate Student Grant.
Image: Penn State
The Northeast Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education (Northeast SARE) awarded Laura del Sol Bautista Jalón a 2017 Graduate Student Grant for her proposal titled, "To be host or not to be: finding sustainable management through endophyte interactions." Bautista Jalón's proposal was one of twenty-three selected for funding among forty-nine submissions in the northeast region.
The objective of the project is to understand the specificity of Verticillium dahliae interactions with asymptomatic rotational crops in potato fields. Laura plans to help develop molecular tools to identify which crop species used in rotation with potato are asymptomatically infected with V. dahliae and which pathogen lineages infect them. This will allow growers to select rotational and cover crops that are non-hosts of the pathogen or at least not for isolates of aggressive lineages. The long-term goal of this research is to improve crop rotations for disease management based on the interactions between the pathogen and plant species, so that new sustainable practices based on ad hoc rotations can be designed.
Laura is a Ph.D. candidate co-advised by Drs. María del Mar Jiménez Gasco and Beth K. Gugino.
