Scientist at New Zealand’s Plant & Food Research have taken the fight against the Psa vine-killing disease online, posting the genome sequences of both kiwifruit and the Psa bacterium on the internet for scientific collaborators globally to explore.
“Crowdsourcing, most often used for sourcing funding for projects, is a powerful new tool available to the scientific community,” says Dr Zac Hanley, who led the project that was originally initiated by Dr Roger Hellens. “By making the genome of a plant available alongside that of the bacterium causing a major disease, we are hoping that the combined expertise of the entire science community will quickly be able to generate new ideas for research and identify new opportunities for formal collaboration to solve a very serious problem for kiwifruit growers worldwide.”
Around 85 per cent of kiwifruit orchards in New Zealand have been affected by Psa since the bacterial disease was discovered in 2010.
Two strains of the bacterium have been identified in New Zealand orchards – a virulent strain (Psa-V), which can cause plant death, and a less virulent strain (Psa-LV) which can affect productivity.
Plant & Food Research’s research programme aims to develop new management practices to control the disease and breed newcultivars with increased resistance to the disease. Both genomes are available on Plant & Food Research’s collaboration site, scinet.org.nz.
