Agronomy and Crop Sciences Commons^™

Biological Control Of Three Major Cucumber And Pepper Pests: Whiteflies, Thrips, And Spider Mites, In High Plastic Tunnels Using Two Local Phytoseiid Mites, Yusuf Abou Jawdah, Nour Ezzedine, Aya Fardoun, Samer Kharroubi, Hana Sobh, Hagop S. Atamian, Margaret S. Skinner, Bruce Parker

Biology, Chemistry, and Environmental Sciences Faculty Articles and Research

To enhance food security, food safety, and environmental health, a bio-based integrated pest management (BIPM) strategy was evaluated at two coastal locations in Lebanon as an alternative to toxic pesticide sprays in commercial high-arched plastic tunnels common in many countries. The evaluation occurred during two cucumber and pepper cropping seasons: spring and fall. At each site, two commercial tunnels were used; farmers’ conventional practices were applied in one tunnel, while the BIPM approach was followed in the second tunnel. In the farmers’ practices, a total of 14 sprays of insecticide/acaricide mixtures were applied during the spring growing season, and 6 …

Extreme Development Of Dragon Fruit Agriculture With Nighttime Lighting In Southern Vietnam, Shenyue Jia, Son V. Nghiem, Seung-Hee Kim, Laura Krauser, Andrea E. Gaughan, Forest R. Stevens, Menas Kafatos, Khanh D. Ngo

Institute for ECHO Faculty Books and Book Chapters

Dragon fruit is widely grown in Southeast Asia and other tropical or subtropical regions. As a high-value cash crop ideal for exportation, dragon fruit cultivation has boomed during the past decade in southern Vietnam. Light supplementing during the winter months using artificial lighting sources is a widely adopted cultivation technique to boost productivity in the major dragon fruit planting regions of Vietnam. The application of electric lighting at night leads to a significant increase of nighttime light (NTL) observable by satellite sensors. The strong seasonality signal of NTL in dragon fruit cultivation enables identifying dragon fruit plantations using NTL images. …

A Microbiome Engineering Framework To Evaluate Rhizobial Symbionts Of Legumes, Kenjiro W. Quides, Hagop S. Atamian

Biology, Chemistry, and Environmental Sciences Faculty Articles and Research

Background

For well over a century, rhizobia have been recognized as effective biofertilizer options for legume crops. This has led to the widespread use of rhizobial inoculants in agricultural systems, but a recurring issue has emerged: applied rhizobia struggle to provide growth benefits to legume crops. This has largely been attributed to the presence of soil rhizobia and has been termed the ‘rhizobial competition problem.’

Scope

Microbiome engineering has emerged as a methodology to circumvent the rhizobial competition problem by creating legume microbiomes that do not require exogenous rhizobia. However, we highlight an alternative implementation of microbiome engineering that focuses …

Reporting Charcoal Rot In Chia And Developing A Susceptibility Assay, Reis M. Misaka, Hagop S. Atamian Dr., Julien Besnard Dr.

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

Chia (Salvia Hispanica) cross breeds were planted in the summer of 2018 with the intent of selective breeding for agricultural benefit. Preexisting pathogens in the soil caused 40-50% fatality of adult plants. This was surprising due to the precursory knowledge that chia has antibiotic and antifungal oils (Elshafie et. al. 2018); chia was only recently documented to be susceptible to Fusarium wilt (Fusarium oxysporum). The primary pathogen responsible was identified as Macrophomina phaseolina (aka charcoal rot); a widespread soilborne pathogen which has multiple commercial hosts (Su et. al. 2001).

M. phaesolina on wheat seed vector where used as …

Sequence Analysis Of The Potato Aphid Macrosiphum Euphorbiae Transcriptome Identified Two New Viruses, Marcella A. Texeira, Noa Sela, Hagop S. Atamian, Ergude Bao, Rita Chaudhury, Jacob Macwilliams, Jiangman He, Sophie Mantelin, Thomas Girke, Isgouhi Kaloshian

Biology, Chemistry, and Environmental Sciences Faculty Articles and Research

The potato aphid, Macrosiphum euphorbiae, is an important agricultural pest that causes economic losses to potato and tomato production. To establish the transcriptome for this aphid, RNA-Seq libraries constructed from aphids maintained on tomato plants were used in Illumina sequencing generating 52.6 million 75±105 bp paired-end reads. The reads were assembled using Velvet/Oases software with SEED preprocessing resulting in 22,137 contigs with an N50 value of 2,003bp. After removal of contigs from tomato host origin, 20,254 contigs were annotated using BLASTx searches against the non-redundant protein database from the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) as well as IntereProScan. …