Developing DNA diagnostic tools for plant potyviruses

The Bio-Protection Research Centre was involved in this project that developed DNA diagnostic tools for plant potyviruses.

Postgraduate student, Ting Wei, co-supervised by Dr Mike Pearson (University of Auckland) and Dr Karen Armstrong (Lincoln University), used DNA microarrays as a novel tool for plant potyvirus identification.

This work discovered there were a number of unknown species present in New Zealand. It also led to important collaborative research with the Centre of Applied Gensensorik (University of Bremen, Germany) to develop oligonucleotide probes for the DNA microarray.

Key publications relating to this research are attached below.