A Chilean potato shows the effects of late blight caused by Phytophthora. Credit: Jean Ristaino, NC State University
Key points:
- New online tool for plant pathogens helps researchers identify, detect and monitor species of Phytophthora.
- The new tool could help researchers map disease and the onset of new lineages.
- Integrating physical maps with the T-BAS data may provide better pathogen monitoring between states and countries.
A first-of-its-kind online tool for plant pathogens will help researchers identify, detect and monitor species of Phytophthora responsible for severe plant diseases, including the devastating 1840s Irish potato famine and the sudden oak death that still plagues the West Coast.
The new pathogen “tree of life” provides researchers with a wealth of information about more than 192 formally described species, including their evolution and inner-group relationships. It also includes genetic sequence data from several locations on the genome of each species. Other important data include the plants that play host to the pathogen, global locations of each species, and where the pathogen resides within the host plant.
“We’re taking all known Phytophthora species and putting them into a living ‘tree of life.’ Researchers can place emerging threat species into the open-access tree and look at which groups are expanding and evolving,” said Jean Ristaino, professor of plant pathology at North Carolina State University and corresponding author of the paper in PLoS ONE.
The new tool will allow researchers to update plant disease information in real-time, while monitoring for disease and predicting the next new lineage that might emerge.
“The real key to preventing disease outbreaks is to grab the signals before the outbreak occurs,” said Ristaino.
According to Ph.D. student Allison Coomber, who helped develop the Tree-Based Alignment Selector (T-BAS), about 150 new Phytophthora species have been identified since 2000—an unusually high number.
Ristaino hopes to eventually integrate physical maps with the T-BAS data to help provide better pathogen monitoring between states or countries.
“We have mined all published data on Phytophthora,” Ristaino said. “Collaboration and sharing data makes much more sense than being secretive.”