Publications by authors named "Zachary A Noel"

Seedling disease management recommendations rely on comprehensive identification of the pathogens. A recent manuscript isolated oomycetes from diseased cotton ( L.) roots to identify the species associated.

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Many oomycete species are associated with the seedlings of crops, including upland cotton ( L.), which leads to annual threats. The diversity of oomycete species in Alabama needs to be better understood since the last survey of oomycetes associated with cotton in Alabama was 20 years ago-before significant updates to taxonomy and improvements in identification of oomycetes using molecular tools.

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Plant disease resistance genes are widely used in agriculture to reduce disease outbreaks and epidemics and ensure global food security. In soybean, Rps (Resistance to Phytophthora sojae) genes are used to manage Phytophthora sojae, a major oomycete pathogen that causes Phytophthora stem and root rot (PRR) worldwide. This study aims to identify temporal changes in P.

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Fusarium head blight (FHB) is one of the most devastating diseases of cereal crops, causing severe reduction in yield and quality of grain worldwide. In the United States, the major causal agent of FHB is the mycotoxigenic fungus, Fusarium graminearum. The contamination of grain with mycotoxins, including deoxynivalenol and zearalenone, is a particularly serious concern due to its impact on the health of humans and livestock.

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The spermosphere is the transient, immediate zone of soil around imbibing and germinating seeds. It represents a habitat where there is contact between seed-associated microbes and soil microbes, but it is studied less than other plant habitats. Previous studies on spermosphere microbiology were primarily culture based or did not sample the spermosphere soil as initially defined in space and time.

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Fungicides reduce fungal pathogen populations and are essential to food security. Understanding the impacts of fungicides on crop microbiomes is vital to minimizing unintended consequences while maintaining their use for plant protection. However, fungicide disturbance of plant microbiomes has received limited attention, and has not been examined in different agricultural management systems.

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The search for beneficial endophytes that can be part of a constructed microbial community has increased in recent years. We characterized three endophytic fungi previously isolated from wheat for their in vitro and in planta antagonism toward the Fusarium head blight pathogen, The endophytes were phylogenetically characterized and shown to be , , and . Individual fungal endophytes significantly increased seed weight and lowered the accumulation of the mycotoxin deoxynivalenol compared with -infected wheat heads without endophyte pretreatment.

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Identifying the pathotype structure of a population is crucial for the effective management of Phytophthora stem and root rot of soybean (PRR). . has been successfully managed with major resistance genes, partial resistance, and fungicide seed treatments.

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The rhizosphere is a multitrophic environment, and for soilborne pathogens such as Fusarium oxysporum, microbial competition in the rhizosphere is inevitable before reaching and infecting roots. This study established a tritrophic interaction among the plant growth-promoting rhizobacterium Burkholderia ambifaria, F. oxysporum and Glycine max (soybean) to study the effects of F.

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Soybean seedlings are vulnerable to different oomycete pathogens. Seed treatments containing the two antioomycete (oomicide) chemicals, metalaxyl-M (mefenoxam) and ethaboxam, are used for protection against oomycete pathogens. This study aimed to evaluate the influence of these two oomicides on isolation probability of oomycetes from soybean taproot or lateral root sections.

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Soybean () is an important leguminous crop that is grown throughout the United States and around the world. In 2016, soybean was valued at $41 billion USD in the United States alone. Increasingly, soybean farmers are adopting alternative management strategies to improve the sustainability and profitability of their crop.

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In the United States, sudden death syndrome (SDS) of soybean is caused by the fungal pathogen and is responsible for important yield losses each year. Understanding the risk of SDS development and subsequent yield loss could provide growers with valuable information for management of this challenging disease. Current management strategies for use partially resistant cultivars, fungicide seed treatments, and extended crop rotations with diverse crops.

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Ethaboxam is a benzamide antioomycete chemical (oomicide) used in corn and soybean seed treatments. Benzamides are hypothesized to bind to β-tubulin, thus disrupting microtubule assembly. Recently, there have been reports of corn- and soybean-associated oomycetes that are insensitive to ethaboxam despite never having been exposed.

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Current methods to quantitatively assess fungicide sensitivity for a diverse range of oomycetes are slow and labor intensive. Microtiter-based assays can be used to increase throughput. However, many factors can affect their quality and reproducibility.

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The effective control to 50% growth inhibition (EC) is a standard statistic for evaluating dose-response relationships. Many statistical software packages are available to estimate dose-response relationships but, recently, an open source package ("drc") in R has been utilized. This package is highly adaptable, having many models to describe dose-response relationships and flexibility to describe both hormetic relationships and absolute and relative EC.

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Fungal secretory proteins that interact with host plants are regarded as effectors. Because fungal effectors rarely contain conserved sequence features, identification and annotation of fungal effectors from predicted secretory proteins are difficult using outward comparison methods such as BLAST or hidden Markov model. In desire of more sequence features to prioritize research interests of fungal secretory proteins, this study developed a pipeline to identify tandem repeat (TR) domain within putative secretory proteins and tested a hypothesis that at least one type of TR domain in non-orthologous secretory proteins has emerged from convergent evolution for plant pathogenicity.

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