Technical Abstract: Peanut is vulnerable to a range of diseases in the U.S., such as tomato spotted wilt virus (TSWV), early (Cercospora arachidicola) and late (Cercosporidium personatum) leaf spots, southern stem rot/white mold (Sclerotium rolfsii), and sclerotinia blight (Sclerotinia minor). Peanut is also one of the major economically-important crops in Georgia and Southeastern region. In the Southeastern U.S., White mold, also known as southern stem rot and southern blight is a common and often destructive disease of peanut in the Southeast. Chemical control adds considerably to the cost of production. Fungicides are already the single biggest cost to most peanut growers, and fungicides for white mold are much more expensive than those for leaf spot. Research has suggested the enhancement of resistance to Sclerotinia minor in peanut by expressing a barley oxalate oxidase gene (accession No. Y14203). Over the past few years, genome research in peanut has provided new opportunities to use the increasing available genomic information to accelerate progress towards an understanding of the genetic mechanisms that control peanut responses to the diseases, in turn, reducing the occurrence of the diseases by developing resistant peanut cultivars. Genomic research can provide new tools and resources to revolutionarily enhance crop genetic improvement and production. Recently, six cDNA libraries from 3 seed stages (R5, R6 and R7) of two cultivars, Tifrunner (resistant to leaf spots and tomato spotted wilt virus) and GT-C20 (resistant to Aspergillus infection) have been constructed, and 24,096 randomly picked clones have been sequenced from the 5’ ends. One full-length cDNA, a putative peanut oxalate oxidase gene (accession No. EU024475) from peanut seed tissues, not in the leaf tissues, has been cloned by contig. Further characterization will be conducted to compare the expression of this seed oxalate oxidase in different tissues and the association with resistance to white mold and other diseases.