Sudden Oak Death Funding/Science
On May 18, Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman transferred $15.5 million from the USDA Commodity Credit Corporation to the
Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) to help halt the spread of Phytophthora ramorum, or sudden oak death (SOD), to non-infested areas of the United States. APHIS will launch a national survey to determine if SOD is causing disease symptoms on hosts and associated hosts in other parts of the United States. This survey results from the confirmation of this disease in March on several varieties of camellia plants in Los Angeles and San Diego counties. Agency officials will apply the funding to nursery inspection, sampling and testing, and SOD education and outreach. More than 100 nurseries in 13 states received infected plants from one nursery in southern California. To help address the evolving disease situation in California, APHIS will provide $6.9 million of this emergency funding to the state for quarantine activities and identification of infected nurseries. This funding also will be used to enforce APHIS’ current federal order to prevent the further spread of the disease to other nurseries in the United States. The remaining $8.6 million will be used for surveys, other quarantine and regulatory enforcement, public outreach and laboratory diagnostics and testing.
In related events, plant pathologists will be getting their first look at the complete genome of two species of Phytophthora. On the10th of June, sequencers unveiled the genome of Phytophthora ramorum and also of Phytophthora sojae, which rots the roots of soybeans. The new sequences should provide insights into basic tricks of the pathogens and could provide new tools in the fight against SOD. The nearly $4 million effort, funded by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), the USDA, and the National Science Foundation, began in 2002 and was carried out by DOE’s Joint Genome Institute in Walnut Creek, California, and the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute (VBI) in Blacksburg. P. sojae was chosen because it's well studied and has a relatively compact genome. It turned out to be 95 megabases long, while P. ramorum, discovered only in 2000, was an even smaller 65 megabases. VBI's Brett Tyler says that similarities between the two species tend to break down in regions that contain host-specific genes, suggesting extensive specialization. Another initial finding is that genes for proteins used to attack plant defenses are particularly abundant. "They seem to be undergoing very rapid evolution," Tyler says. The sequence will help researchers find out much more about how the pathogen and its hosts interact, and that could lead to disease-resistant plants, says Chuanxue Hong, a plant pathologist at Virginia Tech's Agricultural Research and Extension Center in Virginia Beach. "In the long term, [the genomes] will be very significant.” The most immediate payoff of the genome will be better ways to identify and track P. ramorum, and new tests could be available within a year, Tyler predicts. The genome will also help determine whether the two mating types of P. ramorum are sexually active in North America, which would raise the specter of increased virulence and greater host ranges, says Matteo Garbelotto of the University of California, Berkeley, whose laboratory provided the pathogen for sequencing. (USDA News Release, 5/18/04 & Science Now, 6/14/04).
