Ascochyta Rabiei in North Dakota: Characterization of the Secreted Proteome and Population Genetics

Chickpea is one of the most important leguminous crops grown in regions of southern Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and the United States. Ascochyta blight, caused by Ascochyta rabiei, is the most important foliar disease of chickpea. In favorable conditions, this disease can destroy the entire chickpea field within a few days. In this project the secreted proteins of Ascochyta rabiei have been characterized through one and two-dimensional polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis. This is the first proteomic study of the A. rabiei secretome, and a standardized technique to study the secreted proteome has been developed. A common set of proteins secreted by this pathogen and two isolates that exhibit the maximum and minimum number of secreted proteins when grown in modified Fries and Czapek Dox media have been identified. Population genetic studies of Ascochyta rabiei populations in North Dakota have been conducted using microsatellites and AFLP markers. Population genetic studies have shown that the ascochyta population in North Dakota has not changed genetically in the years 2005, 2006 and 2007, but the North Dakota population is different from the baseline population from the Pacific Northwest. The ascochyta population in North Dakota is a randomly mating population, as shown by the mating type ratio

Counting Basic-Irreducible Factors Mod p^k in Deterministic Poly-Time and p-Adic Applications

Finding an irreducible factor, of a polynomial f(x) modulo a prime p, is not known to be in deterministic polynomial time. Though there is such a classical algorithm that counts the number of irreducible factors of f mod p. We can ask the same question modulo prime-powers p^k. The irreducible factors of f mod p^k blow up exponentially in number; making it hard to describe them. Can we count those irreducible factors mod p^k that remain irreducible mod p? These are called basic-irreducible. A simple example is in f=x^2+px mod p^2; it has p many basic-irreducible factors. Also note that, x^2+p mod p^2 is irreducible but not basic-irreducible! We give an algorithm to count the number of basic-irreducible factors of f mod p^k in deterministic poly(deg(f),k log p)-time. This solves the open questions posed in (Cheng et al, ANTS\u2718 & Kopp et al, Math.Comp.\u2719). In particular, we are counting roots mod p^k; which gives the first deterministic poly-time algorithm to compute Igusa zeta function of f. Also, our algorithm efficiently partitions the set of all basic-irreducible factors (possibly exponential) into merely deg(f)-many disjoint sets, using a compact tree data structure and split ideals