Fry Lab: People

People

Current people in the Fry lab:

William E. Fry , Professor
More Information
wef1@cornell.edu

Kevin Myers, Technician III

My primary responsibilities include general lab maintenance and support for researchers and students in our lab. I am currently helping Guohong with his studies of viral-based dsRNA in Phytophthora infestans.

Dr. Guohong Cai, Research Associate

I have investigated gene expression in tomatoes in response to pathogen invasion. This experiment was done in the field and while we found a low variance overall, some genes were particularly “volatile”. I have also discovered viruses in P. infestans. I’m now investigating the biology of these viruses and their utility in gene silencing.

Thalyana Smith-Vikos, Undergraduate Student

Currently I am helping Guohong with his research on viruses that infect Phytophthora infestans. My individual project concerns sequencing thegenome of one virus infecting isolates of P. infestans from Florida. Learning about this virus is crucial to determine if it can be used as abiocontrol or as a vector to insert particular genes into the P. infestans genome and control late blight disease.

Paola Zuluaga, graduate student
Because a long term goal of our lab is to understand the resistance reaction to P. infestans in Solanaceous plants, I chose to investigate the resistance in petunias and tomatoes stimulated by BTH which is an analogue of Salicylic acid. Previous studies in our lab showed that petunias treated with BTH acquired a significant resistance to P. infestans. Therefore, it seemed to us that the P. infestans -petunia system combined with the tomato- P. infestans system might be used to develop a more comprehensive understanding of late blight resistance. The approach I chose was to identify genes that might be involved (referred to as candidate genes) using microarray technology, and subsequently silence the selected candidates via VIGS.