This twelve-month award will allow a five-person team, headed by the PI, to visit four European sites to develop research collaborations by visiting research sites, to begin developing an international grass-fungus-fly community, and explore opportunities for student exchanges among the research sites. The research focus of the planning visits will be fungal pathogens in the genus Epichloe, flies in the genus Botanophila, and native and agronomic grasses that are susceptible to Epichloe infections.
The US team will visit Dr. Inigo Zabalgogeazcoa at the Instituto de Recursos Naturales y Agrobiologia in Salamanca, Spain; Dr. Adrian Leuchtmann at ETH-Zurich in Switzerland; Drs. Nicole van Dam and Wim van der Putten at The Netherlands Institute of Ecology, and Dr. H. Charles Godfray and Michael J. Crawley at Imperial College, London. These visits will contribute to the development of a global approach to understanding the impact of a fungal invasion within a community context.
