College Rivals Team Up To Fight Citrus Greening
January 14, 2016 International researchers, including ones at the University of Florida and Florida State University, are sharing a $4 million grant from USDA to fight citrus greening.
Dean Gabriel, a UF/IFAS professor of plant pathology and project director, said work will concentrate on culturing the greening bacterium in the laboratory in order to be able to conduct experiments on it. So far, researchers have not been able to do this, creating a major stumbling block to understanding the bacterium and developing treatments.
“There are a number of new approaches to combatting plant diseases, including plant genetic modifications and nanotechnologies,” Gabriel said. “These have been unusually hard to evaluate simply because the causal bacteria cannot be cultured in the lab and shipped to other scientists for their research. This team effort is to develop means to rapidly evaluate the efficacy of various approaches against this emerging global threat, not just to citrus but to other crops, including potatoes and tomatoes.”
Kathryn Jones, a FSU associate professor of biological science, will use bacterial viruses to target and manipulate close relatives of that bacterium to hopefully develop a strategy for targeting the bacteria that causes citrus greening.
Other researches involved in the project include: Olufemi Alabi, Texas A&M University; Michael J Davis, University of Florida; Yong-Ping Duan, USDA-Agricultural Research Station, Fort Pierce, FL; Leonardo De La Fuente, Auburn University; Nabil Killiny-Mansour, University of Florida; Wenbo Ma, University of California, Riverside; Georgios Valadakis, University of California, Riverside; Pamela Roberts, University of Florida; and Adriana Castaneda, Instituto Colombiano Agropecuario.
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