Keeping crop diseases in check is like playing whack-a-mole, says David Francis, a CFAES professor of horticulture and crop science. Francis and an interdisciplinary team of Ohio State researchers are studying bacterial spot, a devastating disease that decreases tomato yield for farmers across Ohio and the globe, in hopes of lessening its impact.
Bacterial spot was first described in the 1920s, and many tools to fight the disease have been produced since then. But over the years, the multiple species of Xanthomonas bacteria that cause the disease have kept evolving, becoming resistant to many of these remedies, Francis says.
“I feel like it’s a problem that we’ve solved more than once,” he said. “It’s not something where you can just put your feet up and let it go, but you have to constantly pay attention.”
You can compare it to familiar sicknesses like the flu or COVID-19, with multiple variants emerging each season. Researchers may concoct vaccines to fight specific variants, but diseases keep changing, leaving immunologists scrambling to catch up.
CFAES researchers haven’t been deterred, approaching the problem from numerous angles to develop a variety of disease-thwarting solutions, some which have already made their way into growers’ fields.
Click around on the interactive field to learn more about this problem and the innovative ways CFAES researchers are working to fight bacterial spot of tomato, from roots to resistance.
