Location: Sugarbeet Research
Project Number: 3060-21000-045-015-S
Project Type: Non-Assistance Cooperative Agreement
Start Date: Sep 1, 2023
End Date: Dec 31, 2025
Objective:
(1) Conduct greenhouse experiments to validate laboratory experiments regarding environmental conditions favorable to C. beticola spore germination; (2) Combine data from quantitative spore trapping and latent infection assays to model environmental conditions that mirror greenhouse spore germination results and are predictive of latent infection and symptom development; (3) Establish and evaluate a new comprehensive CLS disease risk model; and (4) Distribute the model and data collected via web application.
Approach:
For Objective 1, Cercospora beticola will be inoculated to sugarbeet plants using established protocols. qPCR will be used to quantify C. beticola DNA. For Objective 2, spore traps will be placed adjacent to grower fields at seven locations. Spore cartridges will be collected from each location every 48 hours for C. beticola detection. For Objective 3, using the date collected, multiple supervised machine learning algorithms will be applied to environmental data to estimate the best predictors of primary inoculum production, latent infection, and symptom development. For Objective 4, a web application will be constructed and serve as the central repository to display data on various geographical and temporal scales across the RRV growing region.
