What pathogen are you working with? I'd think that if you want to infect plants (for the purpose of finding resistant plants) you'd study this pathogen's normal mode of transmission, and try to copy that, since that's the mode of transmission your plants really need resistance to.
Melissa
--- On Wed, 4/8/09, Heath Flax <8orge.onx@gmail.com> wrote:
From: Heath Flax <8orge.onx@gmail.com> Subject: [NAFEX] Pathogens inoculation during Pruning/making of Cuttings, and/or or during Grafting To: nafex@lists.ibiblio.org Date: Wednesday, April 8, 2009, 11:03 PM
"Pathogens inoculation": ...hoping that terming things this way will be acceptable as a (fancy) way of referring to
something otherwise maybe a little more negative-seeming--disease transfer or "infection"...since, in my case, I'm trying, deliberately, to "potentially" do that, but for positive reasons: am trying to expose blueberry bushes to a specific disease, by means of doing something similar to grafting, but more temporary.
Further background: basically, I'm sort of "nearly-grafting"lengthy sections of stems from diseased blueberry plants onto nondiseased blueberry plant branches. Am slicing off inch or more pieces, lengthwise, about 1/3 depth into the healthy recipient plants' stems, and attaching similar pieces of cut, diseased stems. The first year, I tied the two respective components together with twist ties, and I "think" that with some, I tried to seal things with, horribly enough, car wax. The second go-round a couple years later, I switched to another undoubtedly non-ideal sealant:
petroleum jelly (Vaseline type), and also made the diseased donor stems long enough to allow sticking their bottom ends into cups of water down on the ground (hoping to keep the donor stems alive for quite a while, to assist in the would-be , wanted pathogens transfer. In I think two instances, I was able to find a healthy blueberry plant and a diseased blueberry plant close enough to one another to allow directly/permanently doing this sort of semi-grafting (without having to sever the stems of the donor plant).
Maybe amazingly, there "may" be, by now a couple more years later, some successful resultant "taking" (or, "taking") of the fungus involved, by some of the recipient plants. And while I think it's very possible that there may be many more "successful" (in an ironic way) "takes" which simply have yet to overtly show same--that is, have yet to get to the stage wherein the fungus shows in an
obvious way--it does seem, so far, to be at least "possibly" surprising that the possible infection rate that is visible to see is just a few per cent, about 4 or 5 per cent I'd guess. Why "surprising"? Well, basically (to me), because of the impression I began, influenced heavily by repeatedly reading of stories of massive disease infection due to lack of sterilization of pruning tools...such as even, failure to sterilize "every single time between pruning cuts." in some cases...if I didn't imagine this latter or if I'm not somehow mentally exaggerating.
and so, finally, my question: how can it be that it is so hard to deliberately inoculate (infect) plants with a disease--if diseases seem to be so very very contagious by pruning cut or by use of infected graft material?
(of course, for what it's worth, and in case it's not obvious--my efforts at deliberate inoculation of healthy
plants with fungal pathogens, are for the purpose of trying to find resistance or immunity in one or more subject blueberry plants And also, naturally the blueberry disease I am dealing with, is one considered what I understand is "completely" contagious,at least as far as apparently is known: no known immune specimen yet).
Heath, z 5-6, Massachusetts
|