| Affiliations: | |
| Project Leader: | Cody Gale CodyGale@tamu.edu Entomology |
| Faculty Mentor: | Greg Sword, Ph.D. |
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Meeting Times:
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Spring 2017: TBD |
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Team Size:
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4 (Team Full) |
| Open Spots: | 0 |
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Special Opportunities:
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Students will be provided a unique opportunity to explore chemical ecology through both entomological, microbiological, and agricultural perspectives. Conferences and publications are always a possibility, they depend on the quality of the research performed, not necessarily the results obtained. Dr. Sword is likely to give serious consideration to students who wish to join the lab as graduate students if they showed promise as a motivated undergraduate. |
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Team Needs:
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I would prefer student who prefer to work in blocks of time ~4 hrs. |
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Description:
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I need a team to assist in the execution of experiments needed to understand the endophytic colonization of cotton and its ecological implications. The goal of this research is to manipulate the fungal microbiome of cotton plants and understand how those manipulations affect plant-insect interactions. Although this work is focused on the cotton crop system, I will be teaching students experimental designs, microbiology lab techniques, plant-insect behavioral assays, and chemical analysis techniques that can be applied across many fields of study. The focus of my dissertation is specifically aimed at understanding how the manipulation of the fungal endophyte microbiome affects the profile of volatile organic compounds being emitted from cotton. I will guide students through the procedures needed to set up the experiments that I perform, but the purpose of forming this research group is to have students perform experiments that compliment my own. There is much we do not know about the efficiency and effectiveness of our experimental manipulations, but there is a list of relatively straight-forward experiments that can be carried out to help our understanding. Students interested in participating should have a desire to take responsibility for at least one of these experiments completely and perform the research at a quality suited for presentation at a research conference or possibly publication. Involved students will learn small-scale agricultural experimental design in greenhouses and the field, microbe culturing techniques and working in a sterile environmen |