I have been trying to inoculate rhododendron roots with Phytophthora spp for a while and Kim and I have tried several methods that are reported in the literature. I set my latest trial up in the mist chamber to maximise the water availability and finally I seem to have symptoms all be it in only one rep out of three and on only one species out of 7 but never the less I have symptoms yay. See the wilting plant on the right compared with happy plant on the left.
Soil inoculation relative success
I have been trying to inoculate rhododendron roots with Phytophthora spp for a while and Kim and I have tried several methods that are reported in the literature. I set my latest trial up in the mist chamber to maximise the water availability and finally I seem to have symptoms all be it in only one rep out of three and on only one species out of 7 but never the less I have symptoms yay. See the wilting plant on the right compared with happy plant on the left.
Detached leaf experiment
I ran another repeat of my detached leaf inoculation where I dip inoculate leaves in zoospores suspension and incubate them without wounding for 2 weeks. I spent 8 hours on Labor Day doing this and it looks as though it hasn't worked. This is the fourth time I have set this experiment up and the other 3 times I got good data, although the trends don't exactly match what I expected at least the leaves got infected. This time I was meticulous so I can't figure out why only 9 leaves out of 150 developed lesions. Gah! At least this shows the expected trend but there are so many misses I can't really use this as quantitative data. Perhaps I can just note the observations. So disheartening.
In case you haven't already noticed I have joined twitter and I'm having my tweets posted to the gadget in the right column of this blog so if you want to get an insight into what I am doing on a daily basis this will contain little snippets. You can follow me on twitter - @claret84