Equally stoked to check out the UBC botanical garden and have a look at all their kiwifruit vines!! They have a gorgeous and incredibly comprehensive Asian garden section planted within a native coastal forest.

Delighted to present on behalf of the BENEFIT project in the Climate-Smart Agriculture and Food Systems showcase @ Cultivating Resilience summit this week! (+ a lightening talk + a poster, for completeness' sake...) 🦠🌱

Great to see this preprint out, based on Haileigh Patterson's MSc work with me, Matt, & Jay! 🥝🌿

Stoked to have my picture on the February cover of Plant, Cell & Environment! Massive win for Psa enthusiasts everywhere 🌿
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1...

It's a snowy end of the year at UTSC! ❄️

The spread of these effector loss variants is currently limited, and they appear unlikely to cause more severe symptoms than the current population. We recommend ongoing genome biosurveillance in orchards to enable early detection and management of variants of interest.

We carried out pathogenicity and competition assays to understand the risk of these HopF1c loss variants spreading & revisited the orchards these isolates emerged in for further surveillance.

We've carried out sampling across New Zealand's main kiwifruit growing regions, focusing on commercial monocultures of green-fleshed 'Hayward' and yellow-fleshed 'Zesy002' - our Psa3 population has a star-shaped core SNP phylogeny, indicative of rapid expansion from a clonal origin 🌟