Hopes High to Crack the Code on Bacterial Spot of Tomato
July 22, 2020 
Bacterial spot is one of the most serious diseases of tomato in Florida because it can spread rapidly during warm periods with wind-driven rains, and fruit symptoms reduce marketability.
Photo courtesy of Clemson University
Bacterial spot can topple tomato crops anywhere the malady strikes. To help growers stay out of the red zone, University of Florida scientists are aiming to dig deeper into how the pathogen that causes the disease spreads and evolves on farms.
Erica Goss, a UF/IFAS Associate Professor of plant pathology, was recently awarded a $455,000 grant by USDA’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture to study the epidemiology of bacterial spot in tomatoes.
Bacterial spot of tomato is especially rampant in the Southeast U.S., where hot weather, high humidity, and rain provide the ideal environment for disease development.
According to Goss, the pathogen that causes bacterial spot in tomatoes (Xanthomonas perforans) is constantly changing. She and her team are seeking to find out how quickly the pathogen changes and how it changes.
“Through this research, we hope to more quickly and effectively respond to changes in the bacterial spot pathogen that cause more disease problems in the field,” she said. “We are going to look at the effect of pathogen evolution — including the gain and loss of genes that we have observed to have occurred in Florida — on the spread of the pathogen from plant to plant in a given field.”
To help find the problematic pathogen strains, scientists will use high-throughput genetic testing.
“We will send a genome-sequencing center the extracted DNA from hundreds of bacterial strains, and the technology will send us data we can use to study the genomes of these strains,” Goss stated.
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