Open Collections

Dort, Erika

University of British Columbia

Filamentous plant pathogens, comprising fungi and oomycetes, are some of the most economically and ecologically damaging species in agriculture, horticulture, and forestry. These pathogens are well-suited to invade novel ecosystems, and the current era of globalization and climate change has facilitated the global spread of invasive filamentous pathogens. The introduction of invasive pathogens is particularly problematic in forestry as native host trees have no co-evolved defense mechanisms against novel invaders, which can lead some invasive pathogens to spread rapidly through forest ecosystems and cause landscape-level impacts. Significant efforts are therefore being directed towards improving the management and mitigation of forest invasive pathogens. As next generation sequencing technologies and molecular techniques have evolved and improved, management research has shifted to elucidating the genetic and genomic mechanisms that filamentous pathogens employ to infect their plant hosts, cause disease, and spread through ecosystems. The purpose of the research presented in this dissertation was to apply modern genomics methods in a forest pathology context with the goal of creating foundational techniques that can be used to further our understanding of the molecular mechanisms driving phytopathogenic lifestyles and traits in filamentous forest pathogens. In the first part of this work, large-scale comparative genomic analyses were performed on fungal genomes using a novel machine-learning method that was able to uncover distinct genomic patterns associated with phytopathogenic lifestyles and traits. These results provided a proof of concept for the use of predictive genomics in the biosurveillance of forest invasive filamentous pathogens. The second part of this work focused on developing molecular techniques for filamentous forest pathogens in the oomycete genus Phytophthora. First, a polyethylene glycol-mediated plasmid transformation method was tested in five forest Phytophthoras to determine which species was most amenable to further molecular method development. Next, CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing was tested in two forest Phytophthoras, P. cactorum and P. ramorum, using a plasmid-ribonucleoprotein co-transformation approach. The results from the plasmid transformations and CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing demonstrated both the potential and challenges for developing molecular techniques in Phytophthora species and provide a foundation for future genomic research in forest Phytophthoras.

Text; Dataset

2024-04-08

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/87706

Forestry

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/