Clemencia Rojas
University of Nebraska-Lincoln, NE·Plant Science & Agriculture
Rice feeds more than three billion people, but its harvests are threatened by Bacterial Panicle Blight, a disease caused by the bacterium Burkholderia glumae. No rice variety is fully resistant, and chemical pesticides do not reliably eliminate the pathogen and can harm ecosystems and human and animal health.
- Fields
Plant Science & Agriculture
Microbiology & Immunology
Biochemistry
- Topics
Bacterial Panicle Blight
rice
Oryza sativa
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jul 2027
What they work on
- Identify the genes and biosynthetic pathways in Pseudomonas protegens PBL3 that produce antimicrobials against Burkholderia glumae, using genetics and comparative genomics.
- Determine the chemical composition and structure of the antimicrobial molecules secreted by P. protegens PBL3, using metabolomics, the large-scale profiling of small molecules.
- Define how PBL3's antimicrobials inhibit the rice pathogen B. glumae, using transcriptomics to measure which pathogen genes change activity in response.
More about the research
One alternative is to use helpful soil and environmental bacteria that make their own antimicrobials, molecules that kill or slow other microbes. A bacterium called Pseudomonas protegens PBL3 was previously found to block the growth of B. glumae by secreting such molecules, but which molecules do this, and how, is unknown.
Why it matters
Bacterial Panicle Blight causes heavy losses in rice, a staple food for billions. Identifying the antimicrobials that Pseudomonas protegens PBL3 uses against Burkholderia glumae could support biologically based pesticides. These could help rice farmers reduce crop losses and costs while relying less on synthetic chemicals that can harm ecosystems and health.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Miaoying Tian
University of Georgia, GA·Plant Science & Agriculture
Determine how the effector PpalRxLR1 causes disease on cacao by mapping its molecular interactions in the plant cell nucleus and identifying the host processes it disrupts during infection.
Susan Wessler
University of California-Riverside, CA·Genetics
Map the full range of structural genomic variation, including new insertions, copy number changes, presence/absence variants and inversions, created by the Ping/mPing mobile DNA burst in three rice recombinant inbred populations, using long-read DNA sequencing.
William Wuest
Emory University, GA·Chemistry
Synthesize inhibitors inspired by the natural product peniciaculin, which likely mimic the cofactor ubiquinone, and test them against blight-causing plant pathogens using organic synthesis and microbiology.
The school
University of Nebraska-Lincoln: 17 labs on PI Pages, $657M a year on research, 261 research doctorates a year.
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