Tip Sheet: Fight Against Sudden Oak Death Disease

Newswise — Virginia Bioinformatics Researcher Brett Tyler and his colleagues are one step closer to finding a cure for a disease affecting California oak trees that is now showing up in nurseries in a dozen states, including Virginia, and threatening woody ornamentals and East Coast forests.

Tyler and his colleagues have successfully mapped the genome of the devastating pathogens Phytophtora sojae and Phytophtora ramorum. P. ramorum, also known as sudden oak death, is a serious fungal pathogen that has attacked and killed tens of thousands of California and Oregon oak trees. P. sojae, the sister pathogen to P. ramorum, causes serious damage to soybean crops and cost growers $1 billion worldwide last year.

Learn more at https://www.vbi.vt.edu/article/articleview/475/1/15/

Other experts

Nursery stock

For information about nurseries and woody ornamentals, contact Chuanxue Hong, Assistant Professor of Plant Pathology in nurseries and landscapes, based at Virginia Tech's Hampton Roads Agricultural Research and Extension Center in Virginia Beach.

Dr. Hong has been taking plant samples for detection of sudden oak death (SOD) pathogen at nurseries and has three projects on SOD. One on development of rapid and reliable informative detection technology and others are to survey this pathogen in Virginia nurseries and their surrounding forest areas.

Learn more about Dr. Hong at http://ipm.ppws.vt.edu/faculty/hong.html

Eastern forests

For more about the threat to eastern forests, contact Thomas Fox, an expert on hardwood silviculture,

Dr. Fox is Associate Professor of Silviculture in Virginia Tech's College of Natural Resources and Forest Soils Co-Director of the Virginia Tech, North Carolina State University Forest Nutrition Cooperative

His homepage is http://www.fw.vt.edu/forestry/faculty/fox.html

Ray Stipes, retired professor of plant pathology at Virginia Tech and an expert on tree disease, is actively on the looking for the disease in Virginia forests.

Dr. Stipes suggests also talking to West Virginia Department of Agriculture Plant Industries Division Assistant Director and Forest Pathologist S. Clark Haynes, who is on the lookout for SOD in that state's forests.