beautiful drip spread lesions

Here are some new photos from today in the mist chamber, the Phytophthoras are doing nicely in there where it is all wet.

Current Activities

I'm helping to compile data from a study looking at a potential new species of Phytophthora, and conducting kochs postulates on several isolates in collaboration with another lab. I'm also pulling together the data from my poster to put into a paper written by a post doc in our lab to try to get that published too. I'm running a mist chamber inoculation concurrently with my field work to compare findings at 2 different temperatures under very moist conditions. I will also be repeating a detache leaf inoculation using P. ramorum as I obtained rather strange results last time.

that's all for now

APS meeting

Here I am at the American Phytopathological Society Meeting in Portland OR earlier this week. I presented this poster on the pathogenic fitness of the clonal lineages of Phytophthora ramorum.

Disease spread

The first photo shows P. syringae spreading aerially, probably by rain splash during winter. The second photo shows P. nicotianae spreading within the plant during late spring/early summer.

research in the news

Here is an article from February of last year on the Salem news website, talking about the importance of research on Phytophthora spp. and other pathogens for the nursery industry in Oregon which recently exceeded $1bn in sales value. Several people I work with are mentioned and my project on the epidemiology of Phytophthora spp on Rhododendron is mentioned.

Field experiment

Finally I am having some success at inoculating my field experiment. Here is a graph showing my initial data. There are significant differences between species and between cultivars and as expected P. syringae (7) is the most aggressive pathogen so far. This photo shows a Rhododendron inoculated with Phytophthora syringae as part of my field experiment. You can see how the infection has spread aerially by rain splash to near by leaves and has dripped down on to the two leaves below the inoculated leaf.

trip to the state capitol

On Friday I went to the capitol building in Salem to testify in favour of house bill 2508 for the abolition of fees for graduate students with a tuition waiver. I went along with other members of the Coalition of Graduate Employees (CGE) the union for the grads on OSU's campus, and the GTFF which is the equivalent at the University of Oregon. The GTFF and CGE are part of the larger union, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT).

the proposed HB 2508 would stop the universities in Oregon from charging fees on top of tuition to graduate students when we have funding which provides a tuition waiver. The current situation sees 17% of my net pay go back to the university each year, last year this amounted to $2840.

Here is a photo of members of CGE and the GTFF in front of the capitol after testifying for over an hour to a concerned committee.
It was a great experience and it seemed that they committee really took on board our message although in these economic times of severe budget cuts it seems unlikely that any dramatic changes will occur in the near future but hopefully this will begin to open up conversations about how we can improve the situation for graduate students in Oregon.

The CGE has also posted remarks about Friday's trip on their blog and you can download an audio recording of the proceedings from Friday's hearing here. The hearing for HB 2508 begins 16min 29sec into the recording and I testify at 38min 15sec and it closes at 1hr 36min 26sec after 12 testimonies in favour of the bill and 1 agains the bill (someone sent to represent the university).