INTEGRATED MANAGEMENT OF THE BOXWOOD LEAFMINER

Landscape managers need durable, effective, and safe methods for controlling key pests of valued plants in both landscape and nursery settings. The boxwood leafminer (Monarthropalpus flavus, Diptera: Cecidomyiidae) is a serious pest of boxwoods. Boxwoods (Buxus sp.) are a key plant in suburban Maryland landscapes. They are the second most common woody ornamental plant in these settings. In a recent study almost 43% of boxwoods surveyed required treatment for leafminer infestation. Boxwood leafminers also pose a serious problem in historical gardens, such as Longwood Gardens, PA, Dumbarton Oaks and the US National Arboretum in Washington, DC. At the present time, there is a lack of a comprehensive, environmentally sound, management program for the boxwood leafminer. The first step toward an effective management strategy is a better understanding of the boxwood leafminer's life cycle. Over the summers of 1994-1995, leafminer populations were surveyed and life cycles documented and correlated with growing degree days. The first growing degree day developmental chart for boxwood leafminer was developed. Various pesticides were tested in 1995. Different chemicals and application times were evaluated for control of both adults and larvae. At present it appears that application of a translaminar pesticide such as Avid or Merit at adult emergence (growing degree day 352) provides the best control. Resistant cultivars appear to be the most durable, simplest method to control the leafminer. Some cultivars.are highly resistant to boxwood leafminer attack while others are highly susceptible. The third goal of my project was to identify resistant cultivars. This was accomplished by first observing natural variation in leafminer populations in the field. Next I caged ovipositing adults on terminal branches of various cultivars of boxwood, and measured survival of larvae. All cultivars received heavy oviposition with equal frequency, although survival rates were very different. Finally, I tested the hypothesis that leafminers could discriminate among resistant and susceptible cultivars. To test this emerging adults were caged with different cultivars of boxwood and allowed to select plants for oviposition. Plants were then analyzed to determine acceptance of various host plants. I found that although survival on different cultivars can vary dramatically, leafminers were unable to distinguish between suitable and unsuitable host plants

The Reactome BioMart

Reactome is an open source, expert-authored, manually curated and peer-reviewed database of reactions, pathways and biological processes. We provide an intuitive web-based user interface to pathway knowledge and a suite of data analysis tools. The Reactome BioMart provides biologists and bioinformaticians with a single web interface for performing simple or elaborate queries of the Reactome database, aggregating data from different sources and providing an opportunity to integrate experimental and computational results with information relating to biological pathways. Database URL: http://www.reactome.org

Evidence that two phenotypically distinct mouse PKD mutations, bpk and jcpk, are allelic

Evidence that two phenotypically distinct mouse PKD mutations, bpk and jcpk, are allelic. Numerous mouse models of polycystic kidney disease (PKD) have been described. All of these diseases are transmitted as single recessive traits and in most, the phenotypic severity is influenced by the genetic background. However, based on their genetic map positions, none of these loci appears to be allelic and none are candidate modifier loci for any other mouse PKD mutation. Previously, we have described the mouse bpk mutation, a model that closely resembles human autosomal recessive polycystic kidney disease. We now report that the bpk mutation maps to a 1.6 CM interval on mouse Chromosome 10, and that the renal cystic disease severity in our intersubspecific intercross progeny is influenced by the genetic background. Interestingly, bpk co-localizes with jcpk, a phenotyp-ically-distinct PKD mutation, and complementation testing indicates that the bpk and jcpk mutations are allelic. These data imply that distinct PKD phenotypes can result from different mutations within a single gene. In addition, based on its map position, the bpk locus is a candidate genetic modifier for jck, a third phenotypically-distinct PKD mutation

Chromosomal localization of the transcription factor YY1 in the mouse and human

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/47010/1/335_2004_Article_BF00360552.pd

Reactome: a knowledgebase of biological pathways

Reactome, located at http://www.reactome.org is a curated, peer-reviewed resource of human biological processes. Given the genetic makeup of an organism, the complete set of possible reactions constitutes its reactome. The basic unit of the Reactome database is a reaction; reactions are then grouped into causal chains to form pathways. The Reactome data model allows us to represent many diverse processes in the human system, including the pathways of intermediary metabolism, regulatory pathways, and signal transduction, and high-level processes, such as the cell cycle. Reactome provides a qualitative framework, on which quantitative data can be superimposed. Tools have been developed to facilitate custom data entry and annotation by expert biologists, and to allow visualization and exploration of the finished dataset as an interactive process map. Although our primary curational domain is pathways from Homo sapiens, we regularly create electronic projections of human pathways onto other organisms via putative orthologs, thus making Reactome relevant to model organism research communities. The database is publicly available under open source terms, which allows both its content and its software infrastructure to be freely used and redistributed