Inhibition of R. Solani Fungal Growth through the use of Transgenic Tomato Plants
Open Access
- Author:
- Andrew, Fnu
- Area of Honors:
- Chemical Engineering
- Degree:
- Bachelor of Science
- Document Type:
- Thesis
- Thesis Supervisors:
- Wayne Roger Curtis, Thesis Supervisor
Darrell Velegol, Thesis Honors Advisor - Keywords:
- Chitinase
Chitin
Botryococcus braunii - Abstract:
- Throughout the country we are constantly facing the dilemma of insects ruining our crops and plants. The silverleaf whiteflies, B. Tabaci, are one of the many pests that contribute to 15% of our crop losses. Whiteflies are known for their ability to transmit geminivirus pathogens and they have a unique ability to infect other plants through phloem contamination. This is because they affect other plants through their transmission of viral infections to surrounding plants. Chitinase inhibition is a promising key to fix this issue because insects such as the whitefly are greatly affected by this enzyme, due to their chitin-exoskeleton structure, and therefore developing better insecticides can help reduce the number of crop loss. Chitinase is a promising insecticide or fungicide that is currently ongoing in many research projects. The enzyme Chitinase can hydrolyze Chitin into oligomers of N-acetyl-D-Glucosamine (GlcNAc) at specific time-frame of the organism’s life cycles. This mechanism is applied to the degradation of chitin found in the cell wall’s exo and endocuticle section of the integument. This in return will allow the chitinases from insect-associated fungi to develop transgenic plants and increase fungus virulence against whitefly, which applies towards multiple other plants such as tomatoes. This is quite useful for an experiment because it can be conducted in order to observe chitinase inhibition when known positive control samples, which contain chitinase, are placed in the same growth environment with the chitin-infused fungi. For our experiment, cultivated transgenic tomato, Ly61+Ly64, plant samples were collected in order to determine the growth rate of a fungus, R. solani, grown on Potato Dextrose Agar media. The results were then recorded based on a time interval of approximately 2 hours, and a final data analysis was conducted by a digitizing image tool, called ImageJ. Consequently, this enables us to determine the surface area at an allocated time for inhibited and uninhibited fungal growth by subdividing the petri dish, which contains the PDA media, into several quadrants.