| Abstract | The problem of herbicide resistance in aquatic invasive plants poses a consistent threat to the biota in invaded ecosystems, as well as to infrastructure and human water use. Hydrilla verticillata is an invasive aquatic plant that has developed resistance to the carotenoid biosynthesis inhibitor fluridone. I used the method of double-mismatch allele-specific qPCR in order to design a new test for identifying resistant mutants of two different genotypes. After testing 138 samples from across Florida using two sets of primers corresponding to each mutant genotype, I found clear and consistent results for most samples and validated these results through sequencing and comparison to old data. In addition to suggesting that this is an effective testing method, my data found resistant mutant samples in four bodies of water outside of our positive control samples. |
