Spring, 2025
David Joly studies the interaction between plants and micro-organisms.
“We are looking at what genes make plants more resistant to disease and what genes make them more susceptible,” explains Joly, a biology professor at Université de Moncton. “On the pathogen side, we’re trying to determine what genes make a pathogen aggressive with a particular plant and what makes the pathogen detectable by that plant. Plants have an immune system and are able to recognize certain molecules from pathogens, triggering a defence response, a little like we humans do.”
Joly works mostly on cannabis and says some plants are more resistant than others — again, being comparable to humans. Some humans, for example, seem to get the flu every winter, and some simply never seem to get sick.
“If we focus on plants that are more resistant and compare them to plants that are susceptible, can we see differences in the genes?” he says, using tomatoes as an example. “We could take those more resistant plants and use them in a breeding program, crossing them with plants we know produce really juicy tomatoes.”
Joly says he’s starting from the beginning in many ways with cannabis because Canadian researchers have only recently been allowed to study it.
“I have to stick to what’s been authorized to work with,” he says. “So we have to gather as many different plants as possible and test them in our growth cabinets, and then we can sequence their DNA and ultimately use ACENET resources to look at their differences.”
He says he and his team need to screen millions of “letters” in the cannabis genome, and on a small computer, that would take weeks.
“So that's where we use resources that are available from ACENET,” he says. “What I like about ACENET is the training they offer to take students from zero knowledge of bioinformatics to slowly making them more comfortable with bioinformatics coding. You need to be able to program and code and ACENET teaches them that. I can help them, but we often take advantage of the training from ACENET.”
He says ACENET has been especially instrumental with his undergraduate students, who are almost always new to bioinformatics.
“Even at the graduate level, I have students who arrive here and don't know much about bioinformatics, so ACENET’s training is still useful there,” he says. “Then we access the different tools and software so we can analyze the data. Every time we encounter problems, the ACENET people are always very useful in helping us find the problem. Sometimes it’s just a semicolon in the coding and they’re patient enough to help us find it.”
Joly says his work would be “very difficult” to do without the services of ACENET.
“You can wash the dishes manually, or you can use the dishwasher, but if you use the dishwasher, you can wash way more dishes in a given amount of time and get other things done while that's happening,” he says.
