GAPM · Genomics in Agricultural Pest Management

Application of chemical pesticides in agriculture represents one of the major costs of agricultural production and is a key source of environmental pollution, destruction of wildlife and introduction of known carcinogens into the human food chain. The current need for novel methods of pest control coincides with unprecedented advances in genomic analyses of crop plants. The two-spotted spider mite (Tetranychus urticae) is one of the major pests in agriculture. Our group is generating the whole genome sequences of this pest herbivore, and will provide a unique resource for studies of plant-herbivore interactions at the whole genome level. I propose to: 1) Analyze natural variation of resistance to spider mites in Arabidopsis and grapevines; 2) Map major QTLs for spider mite resistance in Arabidopsis and grapevines; 3) Identify genes whose expression correlates with plant resistance through the analysis of whole genome transcription profiles of Arabidopsis and grapevines plants that are either resistant or sensitive to spider mites; 4) Create and characterize Arabidopsis and grapevine strains collected from the Balkans-Montenegro, a divergent and unexploited European refugia. The goal of this study is to characterize the plant response to spider mite feeding, and to identify QTLs and genes associated with plant resistance to this pest. These can be used in marker-assisted crop breeding toward development of spider mite resistant crops. The proposed project will be implemented at the Centro Nacional de Biotecnología (CNB), Madrid, Spain, and at The Department of Biotechnology, Podgorica, Montenegro.