Plants are coming
Finally I have received confirmation that 2 orders for rhodies have gone through so I expect to have the first batch next week and I'll be able to begin inoculating. Hurrah! This first experiment will be a little different from those I have been working on for the field as I will be using dip inoculation which will result in multiple infection sites over the whole plant and I will be working in the quarantine chamber for this too so I am getting smaller plants to fit more in. The result will hopefully be extremely sick plants within 10 days so that I can then detach some leaves and measure the lesion area on them. The plant is to get this little dip experiment underway and mostly done this month and then begin the first farm experiment some time in July. I'm not sure how this will work out but since classes finish this week I will have more time to work on it.
Frustration and Potential
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.
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
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