The Department of Microbiology and Plant Pathology's weekly Plant Pathology 250 seminar series is presented this week by Dr. Jonathan Jacobs from The Ohio State University. 

Seminar Title: “Evolutionary and biological basis of tissue-specificity in plant pathogenic bacteria"

Biography: Jonathan Jacobs is an Assistant Professor of Emerging Infectious Disease Ecology in the Department of Plant Pathology at The Ohio State University. Jonathan is an expert in plant diseases caused by bacterial species in the genera Xanthomonas and Ralstonia and is particularly interested in tropical plant pathology. Jonathan graduated with a B.S. (triple major in Bacteriology, Genetics and Spanish) and Ph.D. in Plant Pathology from the University of Wisconsin—Madison. For his postdoctoral research, he was an NSF Postdoctoral Fellow in Biology at the Institut de Recherche pour le Développement in Montpellier, France and a USDA NIFA Postdoctoral Fellow at Colorado State University. He was also awarded a Fulbright Scholar Award to perform research at the Université Catholique de Louvain, Belgium. His team focuses on the basis of bacterial colonization of plants. They use molecular biological and genomic based approaches to understand tissue-specificity of plant pathogenic Xanthomonas species. They motivated to translate genomics for diagnostics and also are partnering with Ohio State’s Plant and Pest Diagnostic Clinic and the Ohio Department of Agriculture to develop metagenomic based approaches for plant pathogen detection

Faculty Host: Caroline Roper; caroline.roper@ucr.edu