Honors Program Theses

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Honors Program Thesis (UNI Access Only)

First Advisor

Tilahun Abebe

Abstract

Fusarium graminearum is a fungal pathogen responsible for scab, also known as head blight, in cereal crops like wheat and barley. These crops lack natural resistance to F. graminearum, leading to significant economic damage and adverse health effects on humans and livestock. The CRISPR/Cas9 system (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats and CRISPR-associated protein 9), introduced by Jinek et al. (2012), has become a prominent tool for genome editing. In our lab, we investigate the application of CRISPR/Cas9 to control scab disease by editing genes that are known to be essential for F. graminearum to infect its host. There are two main pathways for repairing the double-stranded DNA breaks created by CRISPR/Cas9: nonhomologous end joining (NHEJ) and homology-directed repair (HDR). A previous student who worked on this project using the NHEJ approach was unable to confirm any mutations in F. graminearum colonies. In the current project, we employed the HDR strategy to explore whether we could successfully induce mutations in the MGV-1 gene of F. graminearum.

Year of Submission

2025

Department

Department of Biology

University Honors Designation

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the designation University Honors

Date Original

2025

Object Description

1 PDF file (19 pages)

Language

en

File Format

application/pdf

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