WSU Puyallup Plant Pathology Labs

Today we visited the Plant Pathology Labs at WSU in Puyallup. Jenny Glass, Marianne Elliot and Gary Chastagner gave us a warm welcome.

Jenny Glass, on the left, works for WSU in the Plant & Insect Diagnostic Lab

Here, Yianna looks at a fungus on a potato

Marianne Elliott works in the Plant Pathology Lab at WSU. Her work focuses on Phytophthora species.

This is the thick walled reproductive structure of Phytophthora called a chlamydospore, which can lay dormant in the soil for decades.

Gary Chastagner explains the hardships of the Christmas tree growing business.

A canker on a fir tree

Marianne shows us the leaf blight on a madrone.

This pacific madrone leaf seems to have been “skinned” by a foliar pathogen, creating a ghostly gray-white remnant of the surface tissue, pushed off of the leaf’s surface by the fungus.