Kansas State University

Spring greetings to friends, alumni, and supporters of KSU Plant Pathology!

It was a long winter and it continues to be a long, muddy spring. However, in between the rains we’ve enjoyed redbuds, flowering crabapples, tulips, irises and peonies popping all over Manhattan. Finals are done, our Little Apple is in summer mode, and it’s time to share our news from spring semester 2019.

Awards

American Phytopathological Society Fellow: Dr. James Stack

The American Phytopathological Society (APS) grants the title of Fellow in recognition of distinguished contributions to plant pathology or to APS for research, teaching, administration, professional and public service, and/or extension and outreach.

Dr. Stack is the director of the Great Plains Plant Diagnostic Network (GPDN), and his leadership and vision shaped the network from the start. Dr. Stack’s efforts have helped stabilize the GPDN and National Plant Diagnostic Network. He is also an internationally recognized leader in the field of plant biosecurity, with numerous international and domestic speaking invitations. His research focuses on important plant biosecurity problems which includes high consequence plant pathogens from around the world, and he has had collaborations with Australia, New Zealand, Brazil, Bolivia and Israel. Dr. Stack’s lab focuses on genome-informed diagnostics, epidemiology, and ecology of toxigenic fungi and bacteria. Currently, he has ongoing research on the Select Agent Rathayibacter toxicus. In addition, he is a key member of the wheat blast research team. Dr. Stack also values training and getting students and professionals inspired in the field of biosecurity, so he created a course named “Plant Biosecurity in Theory and Practice” which is held at the Biosecurity Research Institute for 5 days and brings together on average more than 30 participants from many countries each year.

(More information available at https://www.apsnet.org/members/give-awards/awards/Pages/James-Stack-.aspx)

 

2018 Employee of the Year: Diana Pavlisko

This spring, Diana received one of the two Employee of the Year awards from the College of Agriculture for the year of 2018. She has been with the Plant Pathology department for 20 years and has played a very important and supportive role for all the students, researchers, and faculty. Diana was the Human Capital Assistant for the department and handled the department’s personnel recruitments, onboarding new hires, all HR paperwork,

work eligibility for visa holders, Extension Diagnostic Lab support, department deposits, and ordering office supplies. These were big responsibilities that affected us all in some form, but she always went above and beyond to do much more than her job description, making her a model employee of the plant pathology department. Diana recently moved on to take an opportunity working at KSU Counseling Services. We miss her but wish her the best of luck in her new employment.

 

April 2019 Graduate Student Council Travel Grant award: Kseniya Chumachenko

This travel grant was given to Kseniya Chumachenko to attend the National Diagnostic Network Meeting in Indianapolis, Indiana. This meeting consisted of several diagnostic workshops, research presentations, and networking with many plant diagnosticians, university, government, and industry affiliates. Kseniya presented a poster there, titled “Simple Sequence Repeats (SSR) as markers for Rathayibacter toxicus evolutionary history”.

 

2019 Plant Pathology 3-Minute Thesis Award winners:

First place (two-way tie)

• Guifang Lin, presentation titled “Lr42, A Wheat Leaf Rust Resistance Gene”
• Jun Huang, presentation titled “Investigating transcriptional regulation of effectors in Magnaporthe oryzae”

Second place

• Afsana Noor, presentation titled “Understanding physiological and molecular aspects of charcoal rot resistance mechanism in sorghum and soybean”

 

2019 The Kansas Academy of Science (KAS) Graduate Research Grant Award: Afsana Noor

This award was established to “foster the scientific research endeavors of student members of the KAS”, and grants funds that can be used to support of the students’ research. Afsana received the competitive grant of $1,500 for PhD students for her work on the detection of the cellular responses of sorghum and soybean that underlie host senescence induced by the nectrophic fungus Macrophomina phaseolina. The title of her grant proposal was “Understanding physiological and molecular aspects of charcoal rot resistance mechanism in sorghum and soybean”.

(information from http://www.kansasacademyscience.org/research-grants.html)

Lifetime achievement award

Barbara Valent recently received the Lifetime Achievement Award in Rice Blast Disease, presented by the international rice blast community at the 8^th International Rice Blast Conference, May 27-31, Chengdu, Sichuan, China. Congratulations to Barbara on her career-long efforts to understand this globally-important plant disease. Dr. Valent joined the Department of Plant Pathology at Kansas State University in 2001 as a Professor and was recognized as a University Distinguished Professor in 2002. Dr. Valent’s research focuses on diseases of rice and wheat caused by related pathotypes (strains) of the plant pathogenic fungus Magnaporthe oryzae.  These diseases of wheat and rice are called “blast” and they pose threats to key crops worldwide, including Kansas.  Her work has important implications for the practical world of real-time plant breeding and deployment of rice and wheat varieties around the world. Her discoveries about intricate, molecule-to-molecule interactions of fungus and plant have clarified the disease process, opening the door to future targets for control by fungicides or resistant varieties. She has published more than 120 papers that have garnered over 8,000 citations. Prior recognition includes being named a Fellow of the American Phytopathological Society, Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and recipient of the Noel T. Keen Award for Research Excellence in Molecular Plant Pathology from the American Phytopathological Society among other achievements.

 

 

Patent Recognition

Jessica Rupp, Harold Trick, and John Fellers were recognized by the KSU Research Foundation for their patent, “Plant germplasm resistant to RNA viruses.”

 

A busy semester of visiting seminar speakers

The Plant Pathology Department hosted a number of impressive academics and renowned scientists during our spring seminar series.

Dr. Kevin Folta, professor at University of Florida who also hosts the famous Podcast “Talking Biotech Podcast – Evidence-Based Discussion with Dr. Kevin Folta” visited in March. Our own graduate student, Bliss Betzen, was included for one of his episodes.

Dr. Segenet Kelemu was the 2019 College of Agriculture Alumni Fellow. She delivered a seminar, met students and faculty across the college, and was recognized at a university-wide awards reception. Dr. Kelemu earned her PhD here at KSU in Plant Pathology. She is the director of the International Centre of Insect Physiology and Ecology in Kenya. You can read more about Dr. Kelemu’s inspiring career on the KSU Alumni Association page. One of our graduate students, Immaculate Wanjuki, worked under Dr. Kelemu before coming to Kansas State.

Other speakers in the department seminar series included Dr. Carlos Guzman from CIMMYT, Dr. Josh Herr from University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Dr. Edward Buckler from USDA-ARS, Dr. Jacob Washburn from Cornell University, and Dr. Andrew Friskop from North Dakota State University.

Representing the department near and far

Throughout the semester faculty, staff, and students have had the opportunity to represent our department through attending various training sessions and conferences.

In January the Plant and Animal Genome Conference 2019: PAG XXVII was held in San Diego, CA where there were over 130 exhibits, 150 workshops, 1100 posters, and 1800 abstracts. There were also over 3000 people in attendance, of those 3000, there was a nice representation from our group. Of our faculty, Jesse Poland was a session organizer, Barbara Valent was a plenary speaker, and Eduard Akhunov, Alina Akhunova, Sanzhen Liu, and Bikram Gill were speakers. Of our graduate students, Paula Silva, Emily Delorean, Megan Calvert, and Shichen Zhang all presented posters. Of our post-docs, Trevor Rife was a speaker, and Sandesh Shrestha and Jared Crain both presented posters. (https://www.intlpag.org/2019/)

Within the same week as the PAG meeting in San Diego, the week-long Alliance for Science-Science Communication Training was held. Elina Adhikari and Bliss Betzen attended this training, which was mostly focused around communicating the science of gene editing and CRISPR technologies with consumers. (https://allianceforscience.cornell.edu)

March was a very busy month, starting with the 16th International Aspergillus Meeting (Asperfest16) that graduate students Joel Steyer and Cameron Hunter, and faculty Dr. Richard Todd attended in Pacific Grove, CA. Dr. Todd also served as the Local Organizer and Chair. At the Asperfest meeting, Dr. Todd was elected to a third 3-year term on the Aspergillus Genomes Research Policy Committee and was elected Chair of the Asperfest17 meeting in Rome in 2020.

Following Asperfest, the 30th Fungal Genetics Conference was held and participants gathered to present their recent findings.  The Plant Pathology department was very well represented by our faculty members: Richard Todd, Chris Toomajian, David Cook, John Leslie, and Barbara Valent, who was a speaker, as well as post-doc Wei Zhang. Graduate students Joel Steyer, Cameron Hunter, and Jun Huang all presented posters at this conference as well. (http://conferences.genetics-gsa.org/fungal/2019/index)

Our sister state to the north hosted the Nebraska Plant Science Symposium in March which was titled “Training 21st Century Plant Breeders in the “Omics” Era.” A handful of Plant Pathology graduate students in the Plant Breeding and Genetics Club went to this symposium included Paula Silva, Emily Delorean, Elina Adhikari and post-doc Sandesh Shrestha. (https://agronomy.unl.edu/plant-breeding-symposium)

It was Kansas State University’s turn to host SciComm 2019 which was organized by the Kansas Science Communication Initiative and the Sunset Zoo. This conference was centered around finding the right form of science communication techniques for you. Faculty such as Marty Draper represented the Plant Pathology department alongside graduate students: Bliss Betzen, who was a speaker, Joel Steyer, Dylan Mangel, and Nar Ranabhat. (https://www.k-state.edu/scicomm/conference2019/). The theme

of the conference was to better encourage engaging and effective science communication by learning how to connect with the broader public. The keynote speakers included Dr. Danielle Lee, an out

reach scientist who studies animal behavior and behavioral ecology, and Dr. Kevin Folta, chairman of the horticultural sciences department at the University of Florida and host of the Talking Biotech Podcast. Bliss Betzen, a graduate student in the Plant Pathology Department, presented on ‘Crash Course Workshop: Scientific Symposium’ in which she outlined her experience in helping to plan the 4th Biennial Plant Breeding and Genetics Symposium at KSU. The next SciComm conference will be at the

University of Nebraska-Lincoln in March 2020.

 

We wrapped up March with the KSU GRAD Forum held at the Student Union where graduate students: Elina Adhikari, Paula Silva, Joel Steyer, and Chandler Day all presented posters about their research. (https://www.k-state.edu/grad/students/studentcouncil/research-forums/)

 The Plant Breeding and Genetics Club started April off with a bang with their biennial symposium. This year, the officer team consisting partly of Plant Pathology graduate students: Emily Delorean, Paula

Silva, Giovanna Cruppe, Elina Adhikari, and Bliss Betzen;

were driven to showcase the

advancements of women in agriculture. The symposium was titled “A New Era for the Green Revolution: Celebrating Women in Agriculture,” where the program set was entirely made up of women in all agricultural sectors. Mary Guttieri of the USDA was a speaker for this event and a friend of the KSU Plant Pathology department. Our department had an immeasurable amount of representation and provided a great amount of support to the officer team (https://ww

w.pbgatkstate.com).

Presenters included Dr. Amanda Hulse-Kemp, a computational biologist from USDA; Dr. Mary Guttieri, a research geneticist from USDA at KSU; Dr. Natalia de Leon, a professor at University of Wisconsin; Dr. Maria Salas Fernandez, an associate professor at Iowa State University; and Dr. Ruth Wagner, a Genome and Marker Design Platform lead at Bayer Crop Sciences. In addition to the amazing woman researchers hosted, two of our Plant Pathology students, graduate student Joel Steyer and undergraduate student Cameron Amos from Dr. Jesse Poland’s lab won Excellence in Research Poster Presentation at the symposium.

Later in March the National Plant Diagnostic Network (NPDN) took place in Indianapolis, IA where plant diagnosticians, extension specialists, and policymakers to discuss plant biosecurity. We had a great representation from the Plant Pathology department for this conference. Christian Webb, Assistant Director: Great Plains Diagnostic Network, Judy O’Mara, Diagnostician, and Dr. Jim Stack, Professor, Director: Great Plains Diagnostic Network are all faculty members who attended. Alongside faculty, Dr. Jarred Yasuhara-Bell, post-doc, and graduate students, Kseniya Chumachenko, Javier Kiyuna, Victoria Cast, and Chandler Day. (https://www.npdn.org/2019_national_meeting)

To wrap up the semester the Midwest Bioinformatics Conference took place in Kansas City, MO. This conference is in place to bring together bioinformaticians from industry and academics to collaborate and exchange techniques. Graduate student, Joel Steyer attended this conference and presented a poster. (http://kcbioinformatics.org/conference/)

Plant Pathology Graduate Student Club Activities

The Plant Pathology Graduate Student Club (PPGSC) has been busy this semester with hosting events and fundraisers. Each year, PPGSC coordinates and runs the department’s b

ooths at Kansas State University Open House. It was no different this year and it was amazing for the level of outreach and involvement by the students and faculty. Attendees had the chance to win some plants that the students had grown after answering a few questions about plant pathology in Kansas. In addition to public engagement at Open House, the PPGSC officer team participated in two additional plant sales, one at Kansas State’s spring Farmer’s Market and one in Throckmorton Hall on May Day.

Over the course of the three events, the club raised over $300 and engaged with hundreds of people on the topic of plants and plant pathology.

 

Did we miss any conference, training, or workshop that you attended? Please let us know! We love to share opportunities!

Research updates

It’s been a busy spring for publications. Here are just a few recent examples:

Effector Gene Reshuffling Involves Dispensable Mini-chromosomes in the Wheat Blast Fungus

The urgency of protecting the world’s wheat crops from one of the most devastating crop diseases, wheat blast, led to an exciting project that utilized cutting-edge genome approaches. A research team led by Drs. Sanzhen Liu and Barbara Valent constructed a high-resolution map for the genome of the wheat blast pathogen. The map covers core chromosomes as well as a dispensable mini-chromosome. Dynamic genetic content in mini-chromosomes implied the frequent crosstalk between mini-chromosomes and core chromosomes. The involvement of the pathogenicity-associated genes in the crosstalk suggests the important role of the mini-chromosome in pathogen adaptation. The results provide a new mechanism to understand fast-evolving wheat blast pathogens and their interactions with wheat varieties, and thus would provide genetic information to develop effective strategies to combat wheat blast. The research team included Dr. David Cook, Dr. Zhao Peng, Dr. Ely Oliveira Garcia, Guifang Lin, and Melinda Dalby from our department. The paper is available as a pre-print in biorxiv. (https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/359455v1)

Exome sequencing highlights the role of wild-relative introgression in shaping the adaptive landscape of the wheat genome

Dr. Eduard Akhunov’s group along with wheat geneticists from the US Wheat CAP project and Agriculture Victoria (Australia) published a paper in Nature Genetics. This collaborative project also includes scientists from the University of Saskatchewan (Canada) and University of Minnesota (USA). They performed a detailed analyses of genetic diversity in genetically diverse populations of wheat cultivars and landraces, and wild and domesticated tetraploid wheat. They used exome capture method to re-sequence and catalog variation in the gene coding regions of the wheat genome in nearly 1000 wheat accessions (http://wheatgenomics.plantpath.ksu.edu/1000EC/). More than seven million differences in genetic code which can can affect the function of genes that control various traits in wheat adaptation to new growth conditions were identified. Researchers found that gene flow from the wild ancestor reduced the deleterious mutation burden, and played an important role in the wheat’s ability to adapt to new climatic conditions. The findings in this paper will be very important in targeted deployment of wild relative diversity in the breeding programs for wheat improvement. The project is a part of NIFA-International Wheat Yield Partnership funded by Agriculture and Food Research Initiative Competitive Grants 2017-67007-25939 (Wheat-CAP) and 2016-67013-24473 from the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture, and grants from Kansas Wheat Commission and Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Corteva Agriscience, Agriculture Division of DowDuPont provided financial support through collaboration with Agriculture Victoria Services enabling the development of the SNP dataset and technologies.

Welcome new office staff

The main office is the hub of many office activities. We welcome two new people to this key piece of our department:

Welcome Kelly Staab

We are thrilled to have Kelly Staab as the newest addition to our office staff. Kelly is familiar with the K-State family, as she was previously part of KSRE Extension Operations. Kelly’s bright smile warms the front office, so stop by to introduce yourself and to get to know her better.

Welcome Adriana Hurst

We are excited to have Adriana Hurst, our new student worker, as a member of our office personnel. She joined the plant pathology team this May all the way from Charlottesville, Virginia. Adriana is a sophomore majoring in journalism with minor in German and is a member of the K-State forensics team. Please help us welcome Adriana by stopping by the office and introducing yourself.

The articles above were written by Joel Steyer, Bliss Betzen, Chandler Day, Elina Adhikari, and Kseniya Chumachenko.

 

In Memory

In closing, the department is sad to report on the passing of two outstanding colleagues.

Larry Clafin

Larry Claflin, Professor Emeritus in the Department of Plant Pathology at Kansas State University, passed away on February 3, 2019 after a long, hard fought battle with cancer and heart disease. He was 78 years old.

Larry was born July 3, 1940 to Bernice Lucille Mitchell Claflin and Avery Eugene Claflin. He leaves his wife, Dixie Campbell Claflin, son, Michael Eugene Claflin, and daughter, Kimberly Suzanne Claflin, and several grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

Larry grew up on the family farm near Wakita, OK. He went on to receive his B.S in Biology/Chemistry from Northwestern Oklahoma State University, his M.S. in Botany from East Texas State University, and his Ph.D. in Plant Pathology from Kansas State University under the direction of Don Stuteville.

Larry’s first position was as an Extension Plant Pathologist at Montana State University where he also served as the director of the Montana Potato Improvement Association. He joined the faculty at Kansas State University in 1975 as an Extension Specialist. He later gave up his Extension responsibilities for a research/teaching appointment. From 1979 to 1982 he served as head of the department. For many years Larry taught the Plant Pathogenic Bacteria class, where students were required to identify unknown cultures of bacteria and then present their results formally, as if at the APS annual meeting. In 1984-85, Larry spent a sabbatical leave in the laboratory of Anne Vidaver at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where he developed MXP media, a semi-selective medium for Xanthomonas campestris pv. phaseoli. He retired from the department in 2006. During his career, he considered it a very rewarding experience to serve as the Major Professor for over 30 M.S. and Ph.D. students. Many of these were foreign students, whom he and Dixie took into their home, forming lasting friendships. Larry’s international experience was extensive. Over the years he worked in 11 countries spread over four continents. Bacterial diseases of corn and sorghum were his primary emphases.

Larry had an extensive service record. He chaired the International Sorghum and Millet (INTSORMIL) Technical Committee and was the Plant Pathology Section Chair for the Sorghum Improvement Conference of North America (SICNA). Larry was also a member of the NCR-25 Corn and Sorghum Diseases Committee. His service to APS included Associate Editor of Plant Disease, the Office of International Programs (OIP), and as a member of the Regulatory Work and Foreign Plant Diseases, the Plant Disease Losses, and the Standardization of Common Names for Plant Diseases Committees.

He received the Outstanding Education Award from Northwestern OSU in 1992 and the Commitment to Plant Disease Knowledge Award from Kansas State’s Hale Library in 2006 for his donation of over 700 images that are now housed in the Larry Claflin Plant Disease Image Collection.

Larry was famous for presiding over mid-morning coffee breaks in his lab where discussions routinely spanned science, politics, religion and sports. Larry was also known by friends and relatives as “the man with the green thumb,” for he could make anything grow. He once commented that he did not wish flowers at his funeral, because he would rather they continue to grow. After retirement, he moved to Anthony, KS to be closer to his home farm in Wakita. While in Anthony, Larry entered politics serving on the city commission and as mayor. In his last years, he came home to his farm near Wakita where he developed a very successful business of growing irrigated alfalfa until he could no longer continue because of ill health.

 

Merle Eversmeyer

Merle Eversmeyer, age 83, died on Monday February 4, 2019 at the Ascension-Via Christi Hospital, Manhattan, Kansas.

He was born on December 9, 1935 in Waterville, Kansas the son of Gideon F. and Susie E. (Kintigh) Eversmeyer. On March 14, 1982, he was united in marriage to Beverly Ringey.

Merle earned a B.S in Agronomy and his M.S. and Ph.D. in Plant Pathology all from Kansas State University. Following completion of his Ph.D. in 1971, he joined the USDA-ARS’s Plant Science and Entomology Research Unit, which was housed within the Kansas State Department of Plant Pathology as the Cereal Rust Epidemiology Project Leader. In 1972, he became the Research Leader for the Plant Science and Entomology Research Unit, a position he held until his retirement in 2002. He also held a faculty appointment as an adjunct associate professor within the Kansas State Department of Plant Pathology.

Merle specialized in the epidemiology and ecology of wheat diseases, particularly leaf rust. He spent much time surveying for leaf rust each spring to determine if it had overwintered in Kansas (which always resulted in the most severe epidemics) and then entering the data for use in simulation models. His career was spent developing and improving these models for the improved forecasting of rust epidemics and yield losses. He was also actively involved in screening wheat germplasm for resistance to wheat rust and searching for new sources of resistance.

Merle enjoyed gardening, planting flowers and bringing flowers home to Beverly. He also loved Christmas and was known for starting the Christmas music in July and having the house fully decorated. He also loved watching the K-State Wildcats, the Kansas City Royals and the Kansas City Chiefs. He and Beverly traveled extensively through his work, traveling to over 26 different countries.

He was a lifelong member of the United Methodist Church and together, he and Beverly led an adult singles group that traveled all over; at one time they had 85 members.

Survivors include his wife: Beverly of the home; a brother: Harold Eversmeyer and his wife Ruth of Nashville along with many nieces, nephews, other family members and many friends.

Memorial tributes prepared by Doug Jardine

Thank you for reading our news! If you are an alum of our department please get in touch and let us know what you are doing. You can contact us by emailing Megan Kennelly. You can also follow us on Facebook.

If you are interested in supporting the department financially, here is one opportunity. Click the purple button and follow the prompts to the pulldownlist and select Plant Pathology Department Head Excellence Fund.