Black Cutworm Monitoring 2014: We Need Your Help!

Black cutworm moths are blown into Iowa with spring storms each year. The moths lay eggs in crop fields and emerging black cutworm larvae cut seedling corn (Fig. 1 and Fig. 2). However, black cutworms are sporadic pests and scouting is essential to determine if management is necessary. To make scouting easier, the Integrated Pest Management (IPM) Program at Iowa State University coordinates an annual monitoring network that uses moth trap captures and temperature data to estimate when farmers are most likely to see larvae in their fields

2014 Crop Scouting Competition Open to High School Students

The Iowa State University Integrated Pest Management Program is pleased to present the fourth annual Crop Scouting Competition for Iowa youth. It will be held in central Iowa on August 5. The theme for this year is Crop Scouting Innovations and will include both indoor and outdoor events. Teams of high school students (those completing grades 9-12) from across Iowa are invited to compete

2012 Western Bean Cutworm Cooperators Needed

Western bean cutworm (WBC) is a pest of corn that has expanded it’s range across Iowa and states east of Iowa. Beginning in 2003, Iowa State University set up a network of pheromone traps to monitor WBC. This provides yearly moth emergence data to enhance scouting efforts

Climate Change in the Classroom: A Survey of Iowa Agricultural Educators

This report presents results for questions related to climate change from a survey of Iowa agricultural educators. The survey was conducted at the annual Iowa Association of Agricultural Educators (IAAE) summer conference in Ankeny, Iowa on Wednesday, June 29, 2011. The questions were included in a larger survey that focused primarily on evaluation of integrated pest management (IPM) curricula and materials. One-hundred twenty-five agricultural educators who attended the event completed the survey. Ninety-six percent of those surveyed taught at the middle or high-school level. The questions about climate change were included in the survey to with three objectives in mind. The first was to develop an understanding of agricultural educators’ beliefs about climate change. The second was to learn whether or not they discuss climate change in the classroom. The third was to assess their perceived need for curricula and other classroom materials that focus specifically on climate change and agriculture

Using Design Interventions to Develop Communication Solutions for Integrated Pest Management

Iowa State University’s (ISU) Integrated Pest Management (IPM) program partnered with the ISU College of Design (COD) to use Design Thinking and other practical design methodologies and theories to identify and develop approaches to address IPM extension and communication issues. ISU IPM met with agriculture industry, program colleagues, and ISU COD faculty to discuss IPM-related needs in agriculture and to determine the program’s primary challenges. ISU COD faculty developed a two-semester course for undergraduate students, allocating various resources to solve these challenges. Undergraduates in the course, as the primary agents and problem solvers, developed various strategies the IPM program and its colleagues could implement. A model of interdisciplinary collaboration was developed, where design and science may function as equal partners in a design education setting. In our collaboration, the partners bought into a design-led process-based methodology that began with identifying IPM communication needs. This project resulted in unique design interventions to communicate IPM to stakeholders and the public, as well as created a model for interdisciplinary cooperation that can be exported to fields outside of agriculture and IPM

Banner News

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Bayesian modeling of recombination events in bacterial populations

Background: We consider the discovery of recombinant segments jointly with their origins within multilocus DNA sequences from bacteria representing heterogeneous populations of fairly closely related species. The currently available methods for recombination detection capable of probabilistic characterization of uncertainty have a limited applicability in practice as the number of strains in a data set increases. Results: We introduce a Bayesian spatial structural model representing the continuum of origins over sites within the observed sequences, including a probabilistic characterization of uncertainty related to the origin of any particular site. To enable a statistically accurate and practically feasible approach to the analysis of large-scale data sets representing a single genus, we have developed a novel software tool (BRAT, Bayesian Recombination Tracker) implementing the model and the corresponding learning algorithm, which is capable of identifying the posterior optimal structure and to estimate the marginal posterior probabilities of putative origins over the sites. Conclusion: A multitude of challenging simulation scenarios and an analysis of real data from seven housekeeping genes of 120 strains of genus Burkholderia are used to illustrate the possibilities offered by our approach. The software is freely available for download at URL http://web.abo.fi/fak/ mnf//mate/jc/software/brat.html

S-Nitrosation of Protein Phosphatase 1 Mediates Alcohol-Induced Ciliary Dysfunction

Alcohol use disorder (AUD) is a strong risk factor for development and mortality of pneumonia. Mucociliary clearance, a key innate defense against pneumonia, is perturbed by alcohol use. Specifically, ciliated airway cells lose the ability to increase ciliary beat frequency (CBF) to β-agonist stimulation after prolonged alcohol exposure. We previously found that alcohol activates protein phosphatase 1 (PP1) through a redox mechanism to cause ciliary dysfunction. Therefore, we hypothesized that PP1 activity is enhanced by alcohol exposure through an S-nitrosothiol-dependent mechanism resulting in desensitization of CBF stimulation. Bronchoalveolar S-nitrosothiol (SNO) content and tracheal PP1 activity was increased in wild-type (WT) mice drinking alcohol for 6-weeks compared to control mice. In contrast, alcohol drinking did not increase SNO content or PP1 activity in nitric oxide synthase 3-deficient mice. S-nitrosoglutathione induced PP1-dependent CBF desensitization in mouse tracheal rings, cultured cells and isolated cilia. In vitro expression of mutant PP1 (cysteine 155 to alanine) in primary human airway epithelial cells prevented CBF desensitization after prolonged alcohol exposure compared to cells expressing WT PP1. Thus, redox modulation in the airways by alcohol is an important ciliary regulatory mechanism. Pharmacologic strategies to reduce S-nitrosation may enhance mucociliary clearance and reduce pneumonia prevalence, mortality and morbidity with AUD