Location: Sugarbeet Research
Project Number: 3060-21000-045-041-S
Project Type: Non-Assistance Cooperative Agreement
Start Date: Sep 1, 2025
End Date: Aug 31, 2026
Objective:
1. Isolate microbes from sugarbeet leaves and confirm taxa with sequencing.
2. Screen obtained microbes for the ability to inhibit growth of sugarbeet pathogens using in vitro assays.
3. Extract secondary metabolites from growth-inhibiting bacteria and perform metabolomics to characterize putative causal compounds.
Approach:
1. Leaves will be collected from commercial fields. Bacterial isolates will be collected, stored for long term storage, and screened against sugarbeet pathogens for growth inhibition.
2. Isolates that inhibit growth will be subjected to various analyses. Antifungal properties of microbial extracts and isolated metabolites will be performed by disk diffusion and minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC) assays. Metabolomics will be performed utilizing liquid chromatography coupled to mass spectrometry (LCMS) with a time-of-flight detector (ToF) and high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) with UV-VIS detection to identify secondary metabolites from complex extracts. Nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy (NMR) will be used to confirm structural properties of isolated metabolites.