NIMFFAB

06/20/2012

http://entoplp.okstate.edu/nimffab/OSU_Vngrd07.pdf

05/11/2012

SUCCESS STORY:
Protecting Our Food Supply:
Contamination of fresh produce with bacteria such as
E.coli, listeria and salmonella and the resulting food
borne illnesses are on the rise. Two of the deadliest
outbreaks were recorded in 2011. The negative impact on
global health as well as the agriculture industry can be
devastating. With support from OCAST, OSU researcher
Jacqueline Fletcher has made several scientific advances
toward finding solutions by investigating how Salmonella
can contaminate and grow on cantaloupe — these advances
could ultimately save lives.http://www.ok.gov/ocast/documents/spread.pdf

05/11/2012

http://www.ok.gov/ocast/Public_Information/Success_Stories/Success_Stories:_OSU_-_Fletcher.html

Scientists at OSU are examining cantaloupe-Salmonella interactions and how the bacteria can enter and survive inside the melon.

05/09/2012

NIMFFAB highlighted in OSU's State magazine!!


http://statemagazine.org/?p=889

Two cases of foodborne diseases occurred in 2011 — one in Europe and one in America — illustrating a gap in the level of government coordination when responding to such emergencies.

03/16/2012

NIMFFAB graduate student, Dhiraj Gautam got 1st prize in oral presentation in OSU Food & Agricultural Products Center Annual Research Symposium for his outstanding research work on “Interaction of Salmonella and Erwinia tracheiphila on cantaloupe rinds after inoculation onto natural fruit cracks”

12/07/2011

HBRC-NIMFFAB Building

12/07/2011

Francisco's Lab Team

12/04/2011

12/04/2011

Professor Ulrich Melcher won the 2011 OSU Regents Distinguished Research Award on 24 November.
Dr. Melcher is an expert and leader in the areas of biodiversity, evolution, ecology and molecular biology of plant viruses. He has developed numerous fundamental techniques and processes that identify plant viruses and the way they spread. Through OSU’s National Institute for Microbial Forensics and Food and Agricultural Biosecurity, he advises students and scientists in molecular detection of threat pathogens and on tools for distinguishing natural from man-made plant virus outbreaks. He’s managed more than $6 million in grant funding over the course of his career, including awards from the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health and the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Melcher says that from his teen years he knew he wanted to make a positive impact on society and feels science is the best way for him to achieve that.
http://vprtt.okstate.edu/rdra

Oklahoma State Univeristy Office of the Vice President for Research and Technology Transfer

11/05/2011

Dr. Rakesh Kaundal joined the Oklahoma State University faculty in early 2011 as a Research Scientist of Bioinformatics and Metagenomics in the National Institute for Microbial Forensics & Food and Agricultural Biosecurity (NIMFFAB). With a background in Plant Breeding & Genetics, Dr. Kaundal specializes in developing novel algorithms and software on a range of topics e.g. applying statistical pattern recognition, artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies in the area of agricultural biosecurity, metagenomics, regulatory mechanisms of gene expression, genome-wide host-pathogen interaction networks and genome annotation for functional studies. He has developed a range of bioinformatics tools that are useful within the real biological situations, e.g. disease forecasting (RB-Pred), genome annotation (RSLpred, AtSubP) etc. Currently, his lab is developing novel computational tools & algorithms for pathogen detection and discrimination e.g. discriminating genotypes in a fundamentally different way from distance-based and BLAST algorithms and instead, using the Neural Networks, Support Vector Machine or Decision Tree classifiers to build patterns from genome regions (e.g. DNA barcodes) that are under selective pressure; and ultimately incorporating them into searchable databases / visualization tools.
He serves on various program committees of scientific peer-reviewed journals and invited to chair sessions in international conferences on computational biology/bioinformatics.
Web: http://biochemistry.okstate.edu/faculty-research-1/rakesh-kaundal

11/03/2011

Dr V Celia Chalam is a visiting scientist in NIMFFAB for three months. She is a Senior Scientist, Division of Plant Quarantine, National Bureau of Plant Genetic Resources (NBPGR), New Delhi under Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR).
She obtained B. Sc. (Ag) and M. Sc. (Ag) in Plant Pathology from Agricultural College, Bapatla, Andhra Pradesh, India and Ph.D. in Plant Pathology from Acharya NG Ranga Agricultural University, Hyderabad, India; and worked at ICRISAT, Hyderabad for thesis.
She joined Agricultural Research Service in 1993; later the Indian Institute of Horticultural Research, Bangalore in 1994 and worked for five and a half years on various aspects of management of fungal and viral diseases of vegetable crops and developed three high-yielding, disease resistant varieties viz., Arka Arunima (amaranth), Arka Anupama (spinach) and Selection-9 (carrot) along with breeders.
She joined NBPGR on January 19, 2000 and has been working on quarantine of germplasm including transgenics related to seed-transmitted viruses and intercepted 33 viruses including the ones not reported from India or known to possess virulent strains or not known to occur on particular hosts in imported germpalsm. She is also involved in development of seed certification protocols for seed-transmitted viruses of grain legumes and diagnostics for detection of viruses and transgenes. She has executed research projects supported by ICAR and World Bank.
She is a faculty member of Indian Agricultural Research Institute, New Delhi, India and involved in teaching M Sc and Ph D students with special focus on seed pathology and quarantine. She was Convenor of Winter School on Biosecurity and Biosafety: Policies, Procedures and Issues organized at NBPGR, New Delhi. She is actively involved in organizing 10 training programmes on “Biosafety Considerations for Evaluation of Transgenic Crops and Detection of LMOs.”
She is a Member of Project Monitoring and Evaluation Committee and Accreditation Panel of National Certification System for Tissue Culture-raised Plants, Department of Biotechnology, Government of India.
In NIMFFAB, she will be working on diagnostic using qPCR multiplex, end-point PCR multiplex and microarray.

10/26/2011

Mukta Dutta's research focuses on the evolution of BYDV.