A Plant Disease article by Pierri Spolti and coauthors Emerson Del Ponte, Yanhong Dong, Jaime Cummings, and Gary Bergstrom was chosen as Editor’s Pick for May. http://www.apsnet.org/Pages/default.aspx
Spolti and colleagues describe the discovery in New York of the first tebuconazole-resistant field isolate of Fusarium graminearum reported in the Americas. The isolate was found to have the lowest sensitivity to tebuconazole ever documented for this pathogen, which causes Fusarium head blight (FHB). Following the application of tebuconazole, wheat plants inoculated with this isolate had more severe FHB and higher concentrations of the mycotoxin deoxynivalenol (DON) than plants inoculated with a tebuconazole-sensitive isolate. Moreover, preliminary assessments indicated that the resistant isolate was more competitive in these experiments.
Pierri Spolti was a visiting scholar in the Bergstrom Lab in 2012-2013. He completed his Ph.D. at Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul in Brazil in 2013 and he is currently conducting postdoctoral research at INRA in Toulouse, France.
