Adapting Extension Food Safety Programming for Vegetable Growers to Accommodate Differences in Ethnicity, Farming Scale, and Other Individual Factors

Differences in vegetable production methods utilized by American growers create distinct challenges for Extension personnel providing food safety training to producer groups. A program employing computers and projectors will not be accepted by an Amish group that does not accept modern technology. We have developed an outreach program that covers all pertinent food safety information in a manner that is acceptable to each of our target audiences. Utilizing audience targeted programming, small group of food safety professionals will be able to reach a myriad of different types of producers and help them provide the consumer with a wholesome product

Profiling mRNAs of Two <i>Cuscuta</i> Species Reveals Possible Candidate Transcripts Shared by Parasitic Plants

<div><p>Dodders are among the most important parasitic plants that cause serious yield losses in crop plants. In this report, we sought to unveil the genetic basis of dodder parasitism by profiling the trancriptomes of <i>Cuscuta pentagona</i> and <i>C. suaveolens</i>, two of the most common dodder species using a next-generation RNA sequencing platform. <i>De novo</i> assembly of the sequence reads resulted in more than 46,000 isotigs and contigs (collectively referred to as expressed sequence tags or ESTs) for each species, with more than half of them predicted to encode proteins that share significant sequence similarities with known proteins of non-parasitic plants. Comparing our datasets with transcriptomes of 12 other fully sequenced plant species confirmed a close evolutionary relationship between dodder and tomato. Using a rigorous set of filtering parameters, we were able to identify seven pairs of ESTs that appear to be shared exclusively by parasitic plants, thus providing targets for tailored management approaches. In addition, we also discovered ESTs with sequences similarities to known plant viruses, including cryptic viruses, in the dodder sequence assemblies. Together this study represents the first comprehensive transcriptome profiling of parasitic plants in the <i>Cuscuta</i> genus, and is expected to contribute to our understanding of the molecular mechanisms of parasitic plant-host plant interactions.</p></div