During the period of April, May, and June of 2017, most of the progress was related to application for follow-up funding to characterize HLB resistance of plants generated in the present project. With assistance from Dr. Catherine Hatcher (CRDF), Dr. McNellis has coordinated with three faculty at the University of Florida to make arrangements for HLB resistance testing for the existing plants expressing anti-NodT scFv antibody (FT-scFv). These faculty are Drs. Ozgur Batuman, Liliana Cano, and Rhuanito Ferrarezi. They have the expertise to do CLas infections and PCR-based quantification of CLas in plant tissues. We plan to submit a pre-proposal to the CRDF for funding to support HLB resistance testing of the existing trees at Fort Pierce, propagated in Dr. Tim Gottwald’s lab at the USDA facility there. This will allow us to infect and perform quantitative bacterial population analysis in the citrus trees. We plan to submit this CRDF pre-proposal by the end of August, 2017. Dr. McNellis also attended and gave a presentation at the May 22-23, 2017, Forum on Citrus Breeding and Transformation for HLB resistance hosted by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine in Irvine, CA. In addition, Dr. McNellis, along with Drs. Batuman, Cano, Ferrarezi, and Vladimir Orbovic (also University of Florida) submitted a pre-proposal to the USDA Citrus Disease Research and Extension Specialty Crop grant program on May 12, 2017, and were invited to submit a full proposal as of June 28, 2017. This proposal uses the present research results from this CRDF project as the preliminary data for the proposal, and builds upon results from the present work. We plan to submit the full proposal for the August 18, 2017, deadline.