Leading the way in the battle against fire blight

Apples as a fresh produce is really intricately connected to the culture in the United States. We're today in Winchester, Virginia. This is the research station called Alson H. Smith Jr. Agricultural Research and Extension Center. My research program is highly focused on fire blight and trying to understand the biology and epidemiology of that disease, but also develop new management tools. So the chute looks like it was burnt with fire. And you can see here, these glossy droplets of ooze. That's the actual droplet that allows the bacterium to spread with rain to other locations to infect. Eventually, the pathogen moves through the chute and invades the wood. And the bigger the branch is on which the fire blight is, the larger or the higher the chances that the pathogen is going to survive. Fire blight is a bacterial disease of apple, pear, and quince. It's one of the most devastating diseases nationally. The reason why we have to go after fire blight is because it's preventing the orchards to be sustainable and long term profitable. So we cut all the way down here, try to save. So you now lost this whole growth from the last three years because of this canker that is formed here. So if I didn't cut it this year and this tree top died, next year, the bacterium is going to emerge from here and spread to other trees. So why is this important for the growers? Because more and more growers are planting these high density orchards. And that means more trees per acre. And if the fire blight moves in, it can kill a large number of trees really quickly. My lab specializes in specifically in studying the biology of the bacterium inside of these cankers. What we do is we collect them and we try to understand how the physiology bacterium looks like inside. We try to understand the viability of the bacterium, and how long does it stay active inside. So the big project that my lab recently won really has nine different universities nationally that work together, and we're going to look at some molecular aspects of this pathogen, trying to understand the genetics of it, and trying to understand also the physiology, how the pathogen survives in fire blight cankers that has not been done so far. Besides the research, my lab also focuses on extension programming. So we issue recommendations to the growers how to manage many different diseases, including fire blight. So we're trying to make sure that our science has impact and make them profitable. We work on that interface with the research and industry, we're trying to make both worlds merge to the benefit of both.