Project Number: 1230-22000-032-03
Project Type: Specific Cooperative Agreement

Start Date: Jul 20, 2009
End Date: Dec 31, 2013

Objective:
To develop and validate a universal plant virus microarray for detection and differentiation of plant viruses. To demonstrate the ability of an oligonucleotide microarray to detect and differentiate plant viruses from random amplification of plant total nucleic acid extracts.

Approach:
ARS will acquire the lists of viral taxa to be represented on the viral detection microarray, and virus-infected samples from which to amplify nucleic acids to validate the microarray. This information and material will be utilized by both ARS and the Cooperator to jointly develop and validate the microarray for detection of target viruses, and to make validation results available to collaborators via a web server. The Cooperator will further develop bioinformatic software (based on E-Predict and vTaxI) to perform analysis of viral sequences to identify suitable sequences for development of oligonucleotides, and for analysis of microarray hybridization results to determine with a high degree of confidence which viruses were present in validation samples.