The Impact of Next Generation Sequencing on Research and Plant Disease Diagnostics

Thursday 9 February 2012, 1.15PM

Speaker: Ian Adams, FERA

At Fera we have been using next generation sequencing technology (mainly 454 pyrosequencing) for a number of years and have found it has revolutionised our approach to a number of problems, opening up experimental approaches which would have been impractical or even impossible only a few years ago. Metagenomic sequencing of diseased plants and bees has allowed us to identify a number of novel viruses and design more efficient diagnostic assays. Microbial genome sequencing has been used to study the differences in pathogenicity between different strains of bee pathogenic bacteria and to allow the identification of spore wall proteins from a bee fungal pathogen. These spore wall proteins are now being used to raise antibodies for a diagnostic test. Genome sequencing has also proved useful in allowing the rapid identification of potential novel GM events in illegally imported GM fish. We are also using amplicon sequencing to study the microbial flora of healthy and unhealthy bees, anaerobic digesters and potential plant disease suppressive soils. Finally we are applying amplicon sequencing to allow the rapid screening of insect and fungal traps for invasive organism surveillance.

Location: K018, Biology

Admission: Open to all