A revolutionary online resource for plant pathogens, allowing researchers around the world to identify, detect and tracing Phytophthora species. These pathogens have caused a variety of plant diseases, from the catastrophic potato famine in Ireland in the 1840s to the ongoing sudden death of oaks affecting West Coast oaks.

This innovative “tree of life” for pathogens provides comprehensive information on more than 192 officially recognized species, including their evolutionary history and group relationships. It also covers more than 30 unofficially defined taxa. The tool includes genetic sequence data from multiple sites in each species’ genome, as well as key details such as the global location of each species, host plants, and where pathogens are found on or in host plants.

“We take all known species phytophthora and place them in a living ‘tree of life’ using the Tree-Based Alignment Selector (T-BAS) toolset developed by my colleague Ignazio Carbone,” said Jean Ristaino, William Neil Reynolds. Emeritus Professor of Plant Pathology at North Carolina State University and corresponding author on the paper. PLOS ONEdescribes the tool. “Researchers can put new threatened species into the open access tree and see which groups are expanding and evolving.”

Chile potatoes show effects of late blight late blight. Credit: Jean Ristaino, North Carolina State University

The new tool will allow researchers to update information on plant diseases in real time.

“The real key to preventing disease outbreaks is to catch the signals before an outbreak occurs,” said Ristaino, who runs the North Carolina State Emerging Plant Diseases and Global Food Security cluster. “T-BAS can be useful as a tool to monitor disease and identify the next new lineage that may emerge. Researchers can query this database and the tree will contain the new species.”

The first species of the genus phytophthora or “herbicide,” was described and named in 1876. phytophthora They are found in the air, soil, and water and can cause disease in food crops, ornamentals, and trees.

About 150 new species have been discovered since 2000. phytophthora,” says North Carolina State Ph.D. student Allison Coomber, who developed the tool with the team. “This is a very large species of plant pathogen,” Ristaino said. Said. “Many species phytophthora they have a wide range of hosts so they can “move” in wider regions.

Ristaino, who published an article describing a species in Nature in 2001 phytophthora infestansHe hopes to eventually combine physical maps with T-BAS data to help enable better pathogen monitoring across states or countries that caused the potato famine in Ireland.

“We have collected all the data published about him. phytophthora said. “Collaboration and data sharing is much more meaningful than confidential.”

Ristaino, the vehicle phytophthora T-BAS is hosted on the DeCIFR web portal, accessible through the North Carolina Center for Integrated Fungal Studies, which explores fungi and the role they play in agricultural, animal, environmental, and human health systems. More information on accessing the tool can be found on the Ristaino Lab website.