I am finding it difficult to obtain the plants I need in sufficient quantities. In the past I have worked with hops which are incredibly easy to cultivate from cuttings and grow very quickly. I also have worked with E. coli which equally is easy to grow and potentially give you answers overnight. Now I am getting used to working with Rhododendrons and Oomycetes and everything is a lot slower. I feel like I have been here almost a year and I'm only just ready to begin my first field experiment and I still don't have the plants I need and I want to begin in July. I really don't want to push this back another season to the Fall.
On the more positive side I have been given the opportunity to do some additional work to supplement a colleague's data working with P. ramorum. This will be exciting for me as I will gain experience working in containment with this pathogen. But yet again I am in need of additional plants of specific cultivars and of a certain size and it is difficult to find nurseries who can supply me with the numbers I need in the short time frame that I have.
Books
This week I bought 4 very nice, very expensive big hard cover text books from amazon! I have been putting off buying any text books for a while until I was sure exactly which books were the best and would be the most valuable to me. Here are the ones I decided upon:
Phytophthora Diseases Worldwide by Erwin and Ribeiro
Design of Experiments: Statistical Principles of Research Design and Analysis by Kuehl
Phytophthora Diseases Worldwide by Erwin and RibeiroDesign of Experiments: Statistical Principles of Research Design and Analysis by Kuehl
Sick Rhodies
Earlier in the year I inoculated some plants in the greenhouse with a foliar wound method and this plant has developed beautiful necrotic symptoms on the axial buds!
end of term
Wow, things have been busy lately, I have gone from weekly posts to barely monthly. It's the end of term and I've finished my final exams. I only took two classes and I got an A in environmental physiology of plants which was an easy class, actually it was a lot more basic than I was hoping but any way the grade will do my record good. I also took another statistics class, and I haven't got the results for that yet, but the final went really badly and I didn't enjoy the class at all so that will not be such a good grade I am sure. Anyway I got through it and now I am moving on to next term when I shall be taking plant disease dynamics which promises to be interesting and challenging, and also design and analysis of planned experiments which is another stats class but I hope it will be better than the last. In the summer I will be taking plant disease diagnosis which should be another interesting and useful class.
Now it is spring break next week and I shall take a 3 day weekend for easter and a rest and then I'll use the week with no classes to make some progress towards starting the experiments at the farm.
Now it is spring break next week and I shall take a 3 day weekend for easter and a rest and then I'll use the week with no classes to make some progress towards starting the experiments at the farm.
Field trip
- Well it has been a while since I updated. I have been analysing the data from the detached leaves experiment and preparing to start another replication of that experiment.
- This week I went to a nursery near Portland where they have had an infestation of P. ramorum and are under federal quarantine. We collected samples to bring back to the lab for further study.
- I have had midterm exams these past two weeks and I am a bit swamped with homework so the research is going slowly at the moment.
- I presented a little summary of what I am doing at one of our lab meetings recently.
- I also received that last of the leaf wetness sensors in the mail which I had been waiting for and I wired them all up so they are almost ready to go. Then I can get all this equipment out of the office and start using it!
- I had great success with the sterile pond water method for inducing sporangia production and below are some microscopy photos up of the structures I have in my cultures. I'm still getting to grips with the microscope camera and software so the aren't very good yet.
above - sporangia - what I have been looking for for a long time! 
Above an oospore
Above - sporangia
Above - oospores
Above - oospore, antheridum (for fertilisation) visible as knob on side of oospore
Sick leaves and pond water
The detached leaf experiment I set up hastily before Christmas actually worked a treat and so I am going to run two more reps of it and gather some more data from it using digital imaging to measure lesion area.
This morning I cycled to the covered bridge to collect some pond water which I then spent the morning filtering and sterilizing ready to try a new method for inducing sporangia production in my cultures.
This morning I cycled to the covered bridge to collect some pond water which I then spent the morning filtering and sterilizing ready to try a new method for inducing sporangia production in my cultures.
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