Brendan
S. Kelley
2005 - 2006 CSIP Fellow
Research
Interest:
Plant Pathology
How do plants get sick? Why are microbes the most successful
organisms on the planet? What do a plant pathogen and
a sea slug have in common? How can computational predictions
support biological data and inform new experiments? These
are important questions in biology that can be readily
addressed in the classroom and I look forward to giving
students ownership of such inquiries. As a CSIP fellow,
I will draw on my experience in museum-based traveling
science to engage students in “hands on” and
“minds on” learning that emphasizes the reasoning
behind scientific experimentation.
I
am eager to extend my lab’s research infrastructure
into secondary classrooms for experiments such as DNA
separation by electrophoresis, isolation of visible genomic
DNA, microbial digestion of various commercially available
foods, and use of computers to investigate publicly available
gene and protein databases.
In my graduate research, I am using a genome-scale approach
to screen for proteins that are secreted from both the
plant and pathogen during tomato late blight disease development.
Revealing the function of these unknown secreted proteins
will improve our understanding of how plants and their
pathogens interact and what factors lead to disease or
host resistance. Other interests include gene evolution,
ethnobotany, and forest canopy ecology.