PPCP Graduate Students Technical Sharing Sessions - 8/2015

8/2015 - For the second year in a row, the LSU PPCP graduate students organized the Summer Technical Sharing Sessions.  This year demonstrations/lectures were presented by 11 students.  Topics ranged from proteomics to using computer programs to measure colony diameters.  An important lesson learned was that techniques should be very different from the ones taught in labs and classes, otherwise there is little student interest and very low attendance.  To encourage participation by students using common techniques, it may be better for students to give a presentation on how they used those techniques to answer important plant pathology questions.

The summer sharing sessions ran from 9 June to 17 August and the presenters and topics were the following:

• Nike Omolehin, Daniel Debona and Dr. Han, “2‐D Gel electrophoresis with IPG strips: an invaluable discovery in proteomics”.
• Rebecca Sweany, “Large-­scale production of Aspergillus flavus conidia for field inoculations”.
  Ally Lunos, “Assess 2.0 software can digitally measure fungal colony size”.
• Mary Helen Ferguson, “Inoculating a xylem‐limited pathogen into a woody plant”.
• Jingyu Peng, “Phylogenetic study with Linux HPC: free, fast and powerful”.
• Manjula Kularathna, “Sampling and extraction of plant parasitic nematodes”.
• Eduardo Chagas, “How to apply treatments to soybean leaves in vitro while not disrupting the water column in the leaves”.
• Ton Khankhum and Cesar Escalante, “Modified method for viral dsRNA extraction”.
• Marija Zivanovic, “Primer design for PCR and cloning”.