Grand trip to Australia.. Emerging plant diseases threaten many foods crops including those we eat for breakfast such as coffee, oranges, banana and potatoes. Plant pathogens cause global losses estimated to be as high as $33 billion per year. The risk of introduction of pathogens into the US with trade requires continued monitoring and improved diagnostic capabilities at our borders. Phytophthora infestans, the causal agent of potato late blight was responsible for the Irish potato famine and is still a threat to food security globally. We have developed a disease surveillance and mapping system called USAblight.org to report disease outbreaks in the USA and alert stakeholders. The US populations are dominated by the largely mefenoxan sensitive US-23 clonal lineage. We identified and tracked the spread of the historic FAM-1 lineage of P. infestans using multilocus genotyping, next generation sequencing, geospatial analytics and data mining methods. The FAM-1 lineage caused both US and European historic outbreaks, shared allelic diversity and grouped with the oldest samples collected in Colombia, and formed a genetic group that was distinct from more recent aggressive lineages. Novel detection technologies combined with digital agriculture and bioinformatics tools will help mitigate outbreaks, improve deployment of host resistance and inform policy.
Travel was funded by Grain Research Developemnt Corpration (GRDC) and following Universities visited: Department of Plant Industries Research and Development, South Perth; Murdoch Unitversity; University of Adelaide and Waite Institute; AgrBio, LaTribe University; Ecosciences Precinct, Queensland University; and The University of Sydney
Emerging plant diseases threaten many foods crops including those we eat for breakfast such as coffee, oranges, banana and potatoes. Plant pathogens cause global losses estimated to be as high as $33 billion per year. Jean Ristaino discussed the latest research on P. infestans, the pathogen that caused the Irish famine and other plant diseases and their impact on global food security at 7 universities.