“What I want to do with this research is develop new spray management options that target the bacterium inside of the bark of the cankers and target this stage that has been very poorly investigated in the past.” “No matter how well the growers prune the orchards to take cankers out, there will always be enough cankers remaining in the orchard to allow the bacterium to overwinter and potentially infect again the flowers in the spring,” he said. The spray may disinfect the surface of the branches and cankers, but bacteria can remain dormant inside.Īnd that’s where Acimovic’s research begins. Growers spray the trees with copper-based pesticides as a general sanitation measure. Traditional treatment of fire blight begins in the spring. “It looks like someone has taken a blowtorch to them,” he said.
Agricultural Research and Extension Center, where many of the facility’s apple trees used for research have succumbed to the disease. They can, and often do, lead to the death of trees, resulting in profit loss and a fear that other trees will, too, be infected.Īcimovic has seen firsthand fire blight’s devastation. Cankers harbor deadly bacteria that can hibernate during the winter months, a process called overwintering, and spread in the spring to new flowers. Eventually, the bacterium invades the wood tissue and trunk of the plant, causing cankers. It spreads into the shoots – resulting in shoot blight. The continual mix of rain and sun allows the bacterium to infect the flowers, resulting in blossom blight. Flowers eventually develop on the trees, and that's where the entry point for fire blight is.”įire blight thrives in warm, wet conditions and starts appearing during the correlating spring months. “But at the same time, if proper control practices are not applied timely, this allows fire blight to spread more easily. “The reason why they do this is because it's lucrative and they can produce much more fruit per acre,” Acimovic said. Today, most growers plant high-density apple orchard - 1,000 to 2,000 trees per acre - with smaller trees planted closer together. Trees would grow tall and sprawling and require a ladder and a lot of labor to harvest. Historically, growers planted fruit trees far apart on large acreages of land - 200 to 300 trees per acre. The disease remains a challenge for today’s researchers because of many factors, including climate change, the way fruit trees are now commonly planted, and the disease’s ability to spread quickly, and often, secretly.
Discovered in the early 1800s, it is the first-ever described bacterial plant pathogen in the history of plant pathology. “This project will provide growers with critically-needed, next-generation control options for all fire blight phases – cankers, blossom blight, and shoot blight,” Acimovic said.įire blight, like so many diseases that affect plants and humans, is complicated to manage. Cankers are infected dead zones on wood bark and often cause up to 50 percent of losses of orchard acreage. With funding from two grants by the United States Department of Agriculture estimated at a total of more than $360,000, Srdjan Acimovic, an assistant professor in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences’ School of Plant and Environmental Sciences, is developing new effective treatments for fire blight - more specifically, fire blight bacterium Erwinia amylovora in fire blight cankers. Particularly impacted regions include the mid-Atlantic, northeast, and Pacific northwest. In the past 15 years, more frequent warm and wet weather during the spring has sparked epidemics of fire blight, causing losses of up to $22 million per year in apple and pear crops.
Agricultural and Extension Research Center, a Virginia Tech facility in Winchester well-known for its contributions to the commercial fruit industry, are studying methods to fight fire blight, a contagious and often deadly disease that affects apples and other pome fruits, such as Asian pears. Rich in fiber and antioxidants, they are linked to a lower risk of many chronic conditions, including diabetes, heart disease, and cancer.Īnd while apples help protect human health, what is being done to protect the health of this delicious and nutritious fruit? It’s long been known that apples offer multiple health benefits. As the old English proverb goes, “An apple a day keeps the doctor away.”
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