Posted: January 21, 2021
The Department of Plant Pathology and Environmental Microbiology welcomes new postdoctoral scholar, Raymond García-Rodríguez, who joined the Bull Lab earlier this month.
Raymond García-Rodríguez
UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. – The Department of Plant Pathology and Environmental Microbiology welcomes new postdoctoral scholar, Raymond García-Rodríguez, who joined the Bull Lab earlier this month.
García-Rodríguez's research focuses on developing a metagenomics-based diagnostic tool for the detection of Pseudomonas syringae strains, a group of seedborne phytopathogenic bacteria that cause bacterial leaf spot of cucurbits, beet, and chard, from environmental samples.
He holds a bachelor's degree in microbiology and a master's degree in crop protection from the University of Puerto Rico, and a doctorate in plant pathology from North Carolina State University.
While pursuing his master's at the University of Puerto Rico, García-Rodríguez worked on the genetic characterization of Fusarium spp. isolates recovered from bananas (Musa spp.) affected by Fusarium wilt in Puerto Rico. As part of his Ph.D. research at North Carolina State University, he evaluated integrated pest management (IPM) tools, combining flue-cured tobacco varieties with various levels of resistance and selected biological control agents, for the management of Granville wilt of tobacco caused by Ralstonia solanacearum. Additionally, he assessed the role of the rhizospheric bacterial communities on the Ralstonia solanacearum's distribution and suppression, on naturally infested flue-cured tobacco fields, through amplicon sequencing of the 16S rRNA hypervariable regions V3 and V4.
