The fungus Magnaporthe grisea causes the rice blast disease and is a leading constraint to rice production. A better understanding of the molecular response of rice to M. grisea would provide new opportunities to engineer more durable resistant rice cultivars. There are multiple significant reasons why M. grisea has emerged as a model system for elucidating the molecular mechanism governing plant-fungal interactions. M. grisea not only kills rice throughout the world, but some strains attack other major cereals and grasses. The mode of infection is fundamentally similar to many fungal pathogens, and is easier to study then many fungi such as mildews and rust since it can be cultured on defined media so that early stages of the infection process can be studied ex planta. Furthermore, the genomic sequence is available for both rice and M. grisea. This grant will open the MGOS database (www.mgosdb.org) to the community for annotation of genes, submission of microarray data, and incorporation of other relevant rice-M.grisea data. Towards this end, the interface and database will be upgraded to provide tools for submission and enhanced integration of data. The MGOS staff will curate the publicly annotated genes to ensure integrity and interact with the rice-M.grisea community to encourage involvement.
The MGOS web-based database with curated genes and supporting evidence will provide an excellent resource to all researchers of host-pathogen interactions. MGOS is being designed for easy exploration of the information, so it provides an excellent medium for the study of rice-M.grisea interactions by both researchers and students. In order to capitalize on this public resource for the benefit of high school students, extensive tutorials on the interactions of rice and M. grisea will be made available from MGOS. The University of Arizona has a highly recognized program called "Teacher Internships in Plant Genomics Program" (TIPG) which is designed to provide pre-service and in-service biology teachers with university-based lab experience in plant genomics. A one-day workshop for the TIPG teachers will be held to disseminate the instructional material and to elicit advice on how to make the instructions exciting to high school students.
