Plant Pathology

Plant Pathology Professor Dave Rizzo earns national recognition  

Plant pathology professor Dave Rizzo, the driving force behind a number of innovative student education programs at UC Davis, is being honored for his outstanding work in improving the undergraduate experience.

Funds Support Drought-Resistant Rice and Energy-Efficient Food-Drying Research  

The Foundation for Food and Agriculture Research has awarded more than $1.7 million to University of California, Davis, researchers to identify genes responsible for drought tolerance in rice and test a new energy-efficient food-drying process.

Humans may have improved grapes long before they cultivated them About 22,000 years ago, as the ice sheets that consumed much of North America and Europe began retreating, humans started to eat a fruit that today brings joy to millions of wine drinkers around the world: grapes.

That’s what UC Irvine evolutionary biologist Brandon Gaut and UC Davis plant biologist Dario Cantu discovered in a study recently published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences.

10 public varieties in the pipeline

New science, education, and collaborations at the UC Davis Strawberry Breeding Program bode well for the quality and affordability of strawberry production in California. The expanding team of public breeders has launched large-scale yield and disease-resistance experiments on several farms throughout the state and will soon release a new, improved variety.

You could tell that Dave Rizzo was going to be a science guy when he started doing chemistry experiments and growing molds for second- and third-grade show and tell.

But, the fact that science would lead him to square off with one of California’s most destructive forest diseases and help create an entirely new global-disease major at the University of California, Davis, came as a surprise — and to no one more than Rizzo himself.

Foundation Plant Services receives gift to create endowed chair.

You need excellent grapes to make world-class wine.

John Dyson, owner of Williams Selyem Winery, lives by that principal.

“Our motto has always been to make the best wine from the best grapes from the best growers,” said Dyson, who along with his wife, Kathe, owns the winery in Healdsburg, California. “Growers need virus-free grapevines to produce the best grapes from healthy vines.”

UC Davis startup, Astrona Biotech, aims for handheld pathogen detector

Marc Pollack, a Ph.D. student in the UC Davis Microbiology graduate group, and Jeremy Warren, a former postdoc in Plant Pathology, leave Davis at 5 a.m. every weekday morning to commute to IndieBio, a startup accelerator in a narrow alley just south of Market Street in the heart of San Francisco.

Graduate studies in plant pathology with a focus on almond diseases

Just about everyone says almonds are good for human health, but what’s good for the health of almonds?

UC Davis graduate student Leslie Holland wants to know. In pursuit of her Ph.D. in plant pathology, Holland studies canker diseases in almond. Canker diseases invade the woody tissue of the almond tree, typically the result of a fungus entering through a pruning wound.