Mrs Inge Gazendam
PhD Student
Molecular Plant-Pathogen Interactions
Research Interests
Cowpea (Vigna unguiculata) is a tropical legume of high importance in semi-arid countries, due to its drought tolerance and high protein content. A genomic project was initiated at ARC-Roodeplaat to discover genes responsible for drought tolerance. I am enrolled for my PhD study at the University of Pretoria in Biotechnology, under the supervision of Prof. Dave Berger. I employed suppression subtractive hybridisation (SSH) and microarrays in an effort to identify cowpea genes involved in drought tolerance. Future work will involve the testing of selected genes in inducing drought tolerance in the model plant, Arabidopsis thaliana.
Publications
- Gazendam I., Oelofse D. and Berger D.K. (2005). High-level expression of apple PGIP1 is not sufficient to protect transgenic potato against Verticillium dahliae. Physiological and Molecular Plant Pathology, 65(3): 145-155.
- Oelofse D., Dubery I.A., Meyer R., Gazendam I. and Berger D.K. (2006). Apple polygalacturonase inhibiting protein 1 expressed in tobacco inhibits polygalacturonases from fungal pathogens of apple and the anthracnose pathogen of lupins. Phytochemistry, 67: 255-263.
- Gazendam I. and Oelofse D. (2007). Isolation of cowpea genes conferring drought tolerance: Construction of a cDNA drought expression library. Water SA, 33: 387-391.
