Mycotoxin-Induced Plant Stress and cpUPR in Chlamydomonas reinhardtii by Ethan Boroditsky (V), Dr. John McLaughlin1 Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ
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Abstract Every year, tens of billions of dollars are lost in harvest from the Fusarium graminearum fungus attacking and killing critical agricultural plants such as corn, wheat, barley. As it turns out, this fungus uses mycotoxins to kill these plants. Our goal is to better understand the mycotoxin’s mechanism of action. In this study, we used a small unicellular algae called Chlamydomonas reinhardtii as our model organism, because it allows us to better understand and experiment with this toxin. Our study took advantage of a comprehensive genome-wide mutant library for Chlamydomonas. Such a library allows for the performance of screens that simulate identical conditions for an organism with every single knockout mutant simultaneously. We looked at differences in growth as a phenotype representative of fitness. During this project, we wrote a Python program utilizing various libraries to automate the process of searching the internet for hundreds of unique accession codes that correspond to homologous mutants of interest in Arabidopsis thaliana. This allowed us to learn more about the molecular mechanism and cell components the genes were primarily involved in, while also beginning to make the jump to a higher organism.
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