This course examines diseases of plants and animals to demonstrate the use of advanced molecular techniques to study disease epidemiology and ecology. Diseases that may be covered include plant pathogens of both agricultural and natural importance eg. potato late blight, barley scald, flax rust, sexually transmitted diseases of animals and plants. Animal pathogens may include Cryptococcus and rabbit clicivirus. Topics that may be covered include an overview of disease cycles, life cycles and infection cycles of pathogens, disease-host-interactions, comparisons of temporal and spatial aspects of disease as well as the genetic and geographic origin of diseases. We will utilize both phenotypic and genetic marker data to analyse pathogen populations to study their evolution with eg. phylogeography and coalescent analyses. By comparing the evolutionary relationships of genetic lineages with their geographical locations, we aim to gain a better understanding of which factors have most influenced the distributions of genetic variation, and thus the evolutionary potential of diseases. Evolutionary potention of pathogens will be used to develop integrated control mechanisms for plant and animal diseases.

BIOL2121 (BIOL2151 is strongly recommended)