In this episode, the hosts and Sophien discuss a recent collaborative paper (Islam et al., 2016, BMC Biology) that really embodies the concepts of open science. It addresses the source and characterization of a newly discovered wheat blast in Bangladesh. Wheat blast is a fungal disease that affects grasses that are a huge threat to food security. The authors report the geographical distribution of this new disease, characterize the disease symptoms of affected plants, and isolate and validate the causal fungus. Most strikingly, they performed RNA sequencing on symptomatic and asymptomatic leaves and show that RNA from these infected leaves aligns to the genome of a Brazilian wheat blast strain. They conclude that the Bangladesh isolate of wheat blast is phylogenetically related to the Brazilian wheat blast, rather than an unknown or new lineage.

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Islam et al. 2016 https://bmcbiol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12915-016-0309-7

Kamoun, 2012 http://kamounlab.dreamhosters.com/pdfs/MicrobiologyToday_2012.pdf

Open Wheatblast http://s620715531.websitehome.co.uk/owb/

ASAPBio http://asapbio.org

BioRxiv http://www.biorxiv.org

@KamounLabTwitter

Kamoun Lab webpage http://kamounlab.tumblr.com

@baxterTWI

@ehaswell

Contact: taproot@plantae.org

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Read more about this episode: https://plantae.org/blog/taproot-episode-1-season-1-extreme-open-science-and-the-meaning-of-scientific-impact-with-sophien-kamoun/