Dr. Raymond Martyn,

Botany & Plant Pathology Department Head

The plant and pest diagnostic laboratory at Purdue University is now part of a national plant disease network. Working with fellow laboratories at land grant universities around the United States to prepare against plant diseases and pests that might pose a national threat to American Agriculture. Through the national plant disease diagnostic network, which is coordinated by the US Department of Agriculture in a cooperative state research education service, extension service, the plant disease diagnostic clinics provide pertinent information on plant diseases and plant pests and provide information to a national data base system. The National Agriculture Pest Information Service or NAPIS, which is located here at Purdue University, has been designated as a central repository for archiving the select data which is collected from the state and the regional laboratories. The clinics working in cooperation with the USDA will work to strengthen the communication and the strategies in order to quickly identify and respond to emergency disease and pest problems.

In May of 2002, as part of the homeland security initiative in the United States, the Cooperative State Research Education Extension Service of the US Department of Agriculture, instituted a grants program to develop a National Plant Disease Diagnostic Network to utilize the infrastructure of the Land-Grant University systems and their plant disease diagnostic clinics to create a national network that would serve as a database for the detection and initial response to the potential threats to US agriculture.

The system as its being developed is to divide initially the United States into five regions, designated as Eastern Region, a North Central Region, which is the region we’re a part of, the Great Plains Region, the Western Region, and the Southern Region. Each of the states that fall within those regions will form a regional network to transmit information on plant diseases and plant pests to a regional laboratory. Regional laboratories will then coordinate that information and funnel it back to a national database, which is housed here at Purdue University’s NAPIS program.

Well, one of the things that we’re trying to train the first detectors will be to first recognize things that are out of the ordinary, things that typically are not seen in our crop production, some of the common diseases, and common pest.

Another indication might be with multiple outbreaks of a particular disease or pest throughout multiple states within the region or perhaps even across the regions. Something that would not likely be the result of an accidental introduction but more of a deliberate introduction in multiple spots at the same time.

The information flow would be a first detector to send the sample into a plant disease clinic such as the one that we have here at Purdue or any of the other land grant universities in the country. Something would be suppliantly diagnosed that information would be translated to a regional laboratory and at some point when it is determined that it was a species the reaction, the information would be transmitted to the APHIS agency of the USDA and at that point a response would be initiated by APHIS, which is the regulatory agency of the US Department of Agriculture.

The extension educator is going to be as part of the team of first detectors. One of the goals of this project is to eventually be able to help train and educate many first detectors, including educators, crop consultants, certified crop consultants, training in being able to recognize symptoms of particular threat pathogens or threat pests so that they are more likely then to recognize the outbreak and submit it for diagnoses to the proper clinic in whatever state they happen to be in.

When somebody detects the outbreak or the potential outbreak of a new disease, the most important thing that they can do is to collect samples from that disease, make sure that the samples are collected in a way that will be useful to diagnostictians, submit those in as rapidly as possible, and then simply wait for the diagnoses.

As part of the National Plant Disease Network of diagnostic labs around the country, each of the labs will be better equipped to rapidly diagnose, detect and diagnose, any threat pathogens with the ultimate goal of the idea of the faster you can identify something, the faster regulatory actions can put in place in containment of the disease instituted. As part of the North Central Region, we have the primary responsiblity focused on the corn, soybean, and wheat diseases, which are obviously some of our major food crops in the United States and the World. We’re looking forward to participating as part of the North Central Region and ultimately getting national plant and pest disease diagnostic laboratory up and running.