MSI PI Brian Steffenson (professor, Plant Pathology) is the co-lead on a recently published method that will help researchers find and clone disease resistance genes. The method is called Association Genetics Resistance Gene Enrichment Sequencing (AgRenSeq), and has been tested on Aegilops tauschii, a progenitor of modern wheat. The study was published in the journal Nature Biotechnology and can be found on the journal website: S Arora, B Steuernagal, K Gaurav, S Chandramohan, Y Long, O Matny, et al. 2019. Resistance Gene Cloning From a Wild Crop Relative by Sequence Capture and Association Genetics. Nature Biotechnology 37: 139-140. doi: 10.1038/s41587-018-00007-9.
An article about this work appears on the University's News site: Research Brief: New Plant Genome Cloning Method Promises to Bust Rust, Other Diseases in Wheat.
Professor Steffenson uses MSI resources to develop and test AgRenSeq as well as to perform comparative genomic analyses of cloned rust resistance genes to characterize their allelic diversity.