Poster Session: Population Genetics-Oomycetes

514-P

Metagenomic screening for nonculturable oomycetes.
J. TABIMA (1), J. Enciso (1), P. Jiménez (2), D. Riaño-Pachón (1), S. Restrepo (1)
(1) Universidad de Los Andes, Bogotá, Colombia; (2) Universidad Militar Nueva Granada, Bogotá, Colombia

Oomycetes is one of the most diverse lineages, which includes aquatic and terrestrial organisms, both of free-living and parasitic lifestyle. These organisms are of foremost importance in social, economic and health issues as several of them are recognized pathogens of economically important organisms. Since not all extant oomycetes can be cultured, current knowledge of this lineage remains incomplete. Finding of novel organisms is important, as it might contribute crucial information about some unknown pathogens as the case of fungi, where novel non cultivable lineages were recently reported. We propose the comparison of oomycetes sequences such as sets of classical genetic markers (SSU, ITS2) and 66 orthologous genes in several metagenomes of diverse ecosystems to establish whether uncultured lineages of this group are present in these environments in order to discover new species of this economically important group.