Genetics, Genomics, Plant Diseases

Welcome to Liu lab at the Department of Plant Pathology at Kansas State University. Our lab primarily utilizes cutting-edge biotechnologies and computational tools to address biological questions of interest in plants and their related pathogens.

In plants, we primarily work on two crops: maize and wheat. One project aims to identify important genes involved in plant regeneration, which is critical for genome engineering for crop improvement. The project combines CRISPR screening, plant transformation, and genomic analysis to accelerate the discovery. Another project is to map and clone resistance genes for a maize bacterial disease, Goss’s wilt, which is caused by a Gram-positive bacterium. In this project, we explore traditional and novel approaches for gene mapping and cloning.

Our group is also dedicated to elucidate the evolution and functional roles of supernumerary chromosomes, or mini-chromosomes, in fungal pathogens causing blast diseases in grasses (e.g., rice and wheat). Genomes of both historical fungal strains and recently collected field strains were sequenced and assembled. Approaches related to comparative genomics have been actively developed to enable genomic analysis for this project.

The projects are currently supported by the NSF Plant Genome Research Program (PGRP), the NSF/NIFA Plant Biotic Interactions (PBI), the Department of Energy (DOE), and Corteva Agriscience.

Please see blow for more project information.