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I'm a plant pathologist, so I work on plant diseases. Plants get sick just like humans
do. They get fungal infections, bacterial infections, and viral infections. And so what
I'm interested in is trying to understand ways that we can grow crops and prevent these
diseases from causing wide scale economic damage. I would say that the primary impact
of both my research as well as most plant pathology research is to reduce crop losses
to major plant pathogens, and so in many areas of the world this means preventing famine
in many cases. So in many of the staple crops like wheat, corn, soybean, rice, if you have
a major pathogen epidemic or outbreak it can mean having a significant food shortage. In
my research we're primarily looking at population dynamics and so with next generation sequencing
and our capacity to sequence multiple individuals, we're excited because we can now look at
whole populations at the genome level. So we can look at variations of hundreds of individuals
but we can look at their entire genome, whereas before we were only taking a small snapshot.
So I think it's just our capability to look at in such greater depth at these populations
of pathogenic organisms and our major focus is to identify targets for breeding and developing
resistant crops, as well as targets for more effective agrochemicals.