0:00  
Jim: Hello everybody and welcome back to Plantopia. Plantopia is the plant health podcast produced by the American Phytopathological Society. I'm Jim Bradeen. I'm a professor of plant pathology and associate vice president at Colorado State University and I'm hosting Plantopia. And to set the stage for today's episode, let me start with a true personal story. When I was a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin some years ago, tragedy struck our lab late one night, a faulty water bath caused the fire that destroyed a two room laboratory. Now fortunately, nobody was hurt in this incident, but along with a space, my research and that of many other graduate students and postdocs colleagues went along with it. And it was two years before our space was remodeled and inhabitable. And so I can say from personal experience that is dramatic for most of us to see our research go up in smoke. But that is not true for today's guests, and we'll learn why in just a moment. Today I'm very happy to have a conversation with Professor Jason Smith. Jason is the forest and tree health pathologist and he earned his BS degree in Biology from Geneva College in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania, and then a Master's and PhD in plant pathology from the University of Minnesota. And I first met Jason when I started at the University of Minnesota as an assistant professor in 2002. Jason with a graduate student with Professor Bob Linde shets Babina, well known mycologists tree and forest pathologist and expert on wood decayed. So after Jason finished his degree, he completed a postdoc also at the University of Minnesota and then joined the faculty at the University of Florida in 2006. And last year, in 2022, Jason was promoted to full professor in plant pathology, and the School of forest fisheries in geomatics Sciences at the University of Florida, and Jason leads an internationally recognized research program that focuses on the etiology and ecology of fungal diseases associated with trees and forests. And his work has identified several new species of fungal pathogens. He's described new tree diseases, and has explored the role of wildfires as dispensers of fungal pathogens that impact both environmental and human health. A field of study that is called Pyro aerobiology. And this is something that we're going to dig into into this episode. Jason's research is supported by numerous external and internal sources, including the W.M. Keck Foundation, USDA, APHIS, the US Forest Service, the Florida chapter of the International Society of Arboriculture, and many other sources, and his research is both widely published and cited. Today. He has authored or co authored 83 peer reviewed journal articles in a diversity of very well respected journals. Jason also serves as a state forest health extension specialist and is an enthusiastic instructor at the undergraduate and graduate levels. Adjacent is a vocal advocate for issues of diversity, equity, inclusion and justice. And you can follow Jason on Twitter at forest path lab. Jason, it is a pleasure to have you on plant topia, thank you for taking the time.

3:18  
Jason: Well, it's a pleasure to be here. And thank you for that much more than deserved introduction. I really appreciate that. Thank you so much for making me look so good.

3:26  
Jim: While I have the chance, so let me say congratulations on your recent promotion to professor. 

3:31  
Jason: Oh, well, thank you very much. I appreciate that.

3:33  
Jim: So Jason, you shared your professional CV with me ahead of this recording, there's there's one line in your CV that I want to ask you about. It's something that I don't typically see on somebody coming from a plant path background. On your CV, you list Stranger Things, Season Four background talent 2021. What is that all about?

3:55  
Jason: Well, I like to do a lot of different things. And I had an opportunity that came along. And, you know, my brother is actually an actor. And you know, there's a lot of competition when you have siblings. And I should say actually, it was it was Tim who really encouraged me to do it. But it was an uncredited background, talent opportunity. And they wanted somebody that had a nerdy science sort of look to them for this, this particular role. And so, I thought, well, I'm kind of nerdy looking. And, and I have some experience with science. Maybe I maybe I have a shot. And then I took the opportunity and I got about a half a second of fame. And I thought well, that's worthy of putting on my CV right? And so I did. So if you watch very closely in episode five of season four, and the Nina lab episode when 11 walks into the lab for the first time and she meets Papa, you look very close, you might be able to get a glimpse of me walking over to the tank as an engineer just in the background very quickly, but don't blink because you'll miss it.

5:01  
Jim: To anyone out there, if you're interested, I'm starting up Jason Smith fan club. So let me know if you're interested, Matt, and we can all look for that. Stranger Things, of course, is on Netflix. So that aside, Jason, tell me a bit about your interest in plant pathology. And I'm always interested in how our guests really discover this field. So tell us who or what influenced your decision to spend your working life in our discipline? 

5:31  
Jason: Well, you know, I really started out getting into this field because of my interest in trees. Growing up, I just always had just a love and a passion for forests and trees and nature. And, you know, I was always kind of curious about fungi, but I knew nothing about them. Like a lot of people I had, there just weren't something that I learned much about. And during my undergraduate, I had an opportunity to explore botany a little bit, but not much. But I really got excited about certain tree species. And I started reading about them more in particular, I had, I've just been completely obsessed with Aspen, obsessed, I mean, it's like my favorite species, right. And I started reading about them, you know, I would scour the literature. And in the library, I would go to the Kent State University Library, because I took classes there too. And I would read every article I could. And I came upon literature about, you know, through that process, about diseases and research on diseases on aspirin. And the main place where that work was done is was at the University of Minnesota. And I also found that there were people there doing research at the time, through some other publications and things. And as it turns out, one of my professors and my undergraduate, had done his PhD at the University of Minnesota. And so I started talking to him, you know, he was my molecular biology professor. And he basically told me about the plant pathology department at the University of Minnesota. And we had conversations, this was sort of towards the end of my undergraduate degree. One thing led to another and I decided I was going to apply, you know, I applied a couple of different places, but I found out about Bob Blanchette, and Bob Blanchette is program and, and I even found out that Bob Blanchette had worked on Aspen. Yes, basically, very early internet days, right? This was like, late 90s. Very, very early in the internet. But I think I'd maybe sent him emails, if I remember correctly, but it was like, right, when emails were really early, you know, very housetrain early in email days, but but that's basically how it started.

7:33  
Jim: It's clearly been a great fit, you have really done some amazing things in the field of plant pathology. So we're very glad that you, you chose this profession.

7:42  
Jason: Well, I'm very fortunate, I feel very, very fortunate to have met some really great people along the way and just kind of been lucky to have had these sorts of connections as started early on like that, you know, thing brought me to the University of Minnesota, which was a very important first step.

7:56  
Jim: Well, today, your your your research really encompasses a lot of different aspects of plant biology and forest health. But I really want to focus on something that I think is very unusual, very exciting, very novel. And this really deals with smoke the dispersal mechanism. And wildfires are in the news a lot lately. It seems from Australia to the Amazon to Siberia, the world just seems to be on fire everywhere. And in recent years here in the US significant acreage has been destroyed by fires California, the Pacific Northwest, my state of Colorado, several other places. In 2018, you and a group of collaborators published a paper in the Journal Ecosphere, called "Pyroaerobiology: The Aerosolization and Transport of Viable Microbial Life by Wildland Fire." And there's a whole lot in that title. Let's start with the definition, though. And the stapler actually coined the phrase, Pyroaerobiology. What is Pyroaerobiology?

9:01  
Jason: Well, it's basically the study of that living component of the smoke that is produced from these wildfires. And interestingly, it was something that was kind of a surprise to me, this is something that hadn't really been studied before, prior to that study, or, you know, a year or two before that, my colleague here Lita Kobsiar it was really the person who came up with this concept of this idea came to me and she said, Jason, would you be interested in collaborating on a little study where we would look at what's living in wildfire smoke, whether or not there are viable microbes there. And, you know, we could look at different aspects of that, but initially, she just wanted to collaborate on that. And we both had a graduate students work together on that and we had some very, very rudimentary methods initially. To do that. We basically use a Petri plate that we put on these long poles and put them on the front edge of these fires. because we have a lot of control burns, and so we had access to that she was one that made that happen. And we looked at a bunch of different ways to collect smoke samples, if you will, initially. And what was surprising, I just figured people already looked at this, I just thought, Well, surely people have looked at whether or not there's, you know, viable microbes and smoke. But I couldn't believe that that was something that had been kind of ignored. But it had. So when we did that meeting, you know, we discovered, of course, that there was not only viable life there, but there were a lot of potential pathogens. And there was a connection between what was burned, in other words, what was consumed, the the type of vegetation that was burned, actually, you know, influenced what was actually found in that smoke plume. So there was a, you know, a certainly a connection between the two. And you know, the patterns of what we found and what was being dispersed and that smoke, there may very well be dispersal patterns and mechanisms, you know, and other dynamics that needed to be investigated. And we suddenly said, Hey, we need to, we need to look at this, we need to do more studies. And so, Lita continued to really develop a methodology for sampling. And she worked on this as she she left Florida and went to University of Idaho and developed very detailed sampling methods using drones. And using air samplers that were attached to the drones so that she was able to have much more precision with the sampling in the smoke plumes to make sure that the smoke that was being sampled was being sampled at a certain rate, and only specifically from the smoke plumes themselves, and so on, which enabled for far better experimentation. And so that allowed us to put together some proposals, and we started to develop more hypotheses. And we had hypotheses, particularly in relation to human health, because we've had a lot of emerging fungal diseases and different parts of particularly in western North America that their etiology is poorly understood. But they've been emerging and sort of increasing that, particularly in places like California and other parts of the West Indies, fungal pathogens are widespread in environmental situations, they're associated, some of them are associated with soil, some are associated with vegetation, but how they are dispersed and how are there you know, reaching vulnerable populations was not understood. At the same time, the human health impact of wildfire smoke has been widely studied and written about, you know, there have been many papers, where people have discussed the human health impacts of wildfire smoke, but the living component of it, the potential for pathogens or microbes to be part of that has been completely ignored. There's been literally nothing addressed on that side of it. And so after we published that first paper that demonstrated that, yes, there are microbes there, bacteria, fungi, and some of these are pathogens, we sort of put two and two together to say, look, some of these may, in fact, include some of these emerging human pathogens, these these emerging fungal diseases that have sort of unknown etiology. Maybe that etiology might include these large mega fires, these widespread fire events that are occurring in the West, where huge populations are being exposed to smoke over large periods of time. And so that set the stage for this bigger project, this tech project that that we've been working on for the last two years that involves multiple investigators and sort of looking at it on a broader scale.

13:33  
Jim: So I have so many questions about this. And first and foremost, though, buyers hot, is it? Am I wrong about that, but these microbes are surviving that hot environment and are somehow moving into to smoke.

13:50  
Jason: That's right. I mean, you know, fires can be very hot, you know, these big fires that are occurring are very, very chaotic events. And so when when you have when these very, very large fires, you have all sorts of different wind currents occurring, very strong convective winds occurring ahead of the fire, that can kick up dusts and you know, kick up the particulate matter and carry it ahead of the fire, you can have a lot of variation in the temperature within the fire itself, you can have all these different processes that occur. And I'm not a fire scientist, by the way, I'm sort of interpreting what I've learned by working with these colleagues of mine. But that variation in the fire itself allows for a massive amount of particulate matter and consumed material to be dispersed up into the atmosphere and sometimes to very high altitudes into the atmosphere. And so that allows for some things to, you know, obviously be carried that not weren't necessarily consumed completely. That's one thing. The other thing is a lot of these microbes are very thermotolerant to they're able to tolerate, and so maybe not when they're there may not be during their growth phase. But we have dormant stages of a lot of these fungi and, and bacteria that are very thermotolerant capable of dealing with very extreme conditions, especially if they are embedded in particulate matter, because remember, we're not talking about normal dispersal events of fungi that are just like growing and producing spores and then becoming airborne, through like, you know, the normal reproductive process. Okay, like the way we think about typical epidemiology of plant pathology, one on one, we think about a fungus producing spores, you know, on the surface of a plant. And then under the right conditions, those spores become airborne, and so on. That's that that's not what's happening here. This is a que almost like a bomb going off, everything is just going off up into the atmosphere. And whatever stage it was in at that point in time, some of it may have been in a reproductive stage, some of it wasn't some of its embedded in that particulate matter, and what is able to tolerate that condition and still be viable on the other end, so to speak, it's highly chaotic. And quite frankly, studying that, and figuring out what's viable is a complicated process, by the way, too. But it's definitely a very different process than normal reproductive propagules and normal epidemiology. That's why it requires a different paradigm of epidemiology. Quite frankly, smoke is different from ambient air. Totally different.

16:24  
Jim: So it sounds as though some of the the propagules that you're detecting are in Smoke itself. Some might be in this front ahead of the Moke. Just sort of the turbulent winds that are generated as part of that process. Are you finding taxa that are plant associated? Are these primarily soil associated? Or is it a mixture?

16:44  
Jason: Actually, right now we're in the Bible fungi that we've been able to detect in a number of different wildfires and different samples over a couple of years. And we're assessing all the different traits. And so we're we are basically looking at essentially what they are. So they've been identified by sequencing. And then we have basically categorized them by different traits, life history traits, so whether or not they are, you know, halotolerant, whether they're, you know, psychrophilic, zap, you know, that whether or not they're able to tolerate extreme conditions, those types of things. And also, looking at their biogeography, also touques, we're kind of interested in whether or not we're finding things that have not been reported in North America before those types of things. But understanding the life history traits allows us to kind of determine whether or not there's, you know, sort of a unique, I don't want to really want to use the term assemblage, but unique population or unique group of organisms that are being found or not. But what you do find is, these organ, a lot of the organisms that are viable, a lot of them tend to be more, you know, obviously, the more thermotolerant, the more extreme of file type organisms, those that are able to tolerate those extreme conditions. And you definitely have, generally a different profile of organisms that are viable, versus those that if you just using molecular techniques, you have very different provox, of course, molecular techniques, you're gonna find a lot of things that aren't viable there. Right, we're comparing methods right now to, to kind of look at what kinds of information we get from the molecular side versus the culture omics side of things and kind of, you know, trying to see if we get sort of congruent information or not, and, you know, and how that information can be used. Because it's complicated, because the other thing is, a lot of these samples are relatively low biomass, very low biomass, even if you're sampling, actively using a pump on a drone to sample from the smoke, and you're getting particulate matter there, the amount of biomass of numbers of cells is still relatively low. So it's still tricky to sometimes utilize that for for Illumina sequencing, those types of things. And so we're working through the sort of the methodology and comparing methodologies, because there's a lot of people interested in arrow biome sampling, and doing that for other reasons. It's definitely a nuanced thing, especially if you're if you're using something just like, you know, IGS, for example, it's not always giving you the clearest picture of what's there.

19:04  
Jim: Right, right. One of the many interesting things that he noted in your eco sphere paper was evident spet sites that have undergone periodic burns seem to be enriched for microbial species that are maybe more heat tolerant, because that evidence that smoke is really a driver for these changes in assemblages.

19:27  
Jason: You know, that's initially what we're finding now that again, if that's something I think we need to look at, on a bigger scale, I think looking at our multiple ecosystems that are fire dependent. We did get some samples from Konza prairie this year, which is a you know, regularly burned ecosystem. And it'll be interesting when we finished this trade analysis to see if that, you know, that same result is observed that it's enriched for those. That will be an interesting approach, I think to look at for management potentially because you know, one of the things that people are very Interested in right now in places like California is the whole idea of doing controlled burns, there was a moratorium on control burns last year in California, it for a long time. And, you know, I mean, historically, in the West, there's been a suppression of doing any burning, you know, really over the whole region for a long time. A lot of ecologist and forest managers and so on have in a more recently really been trying to argue that you need to do more burning on the landscape to, to prevent these larger fires for one thing, but the other thing is, I mean, maybe there's a lot more fine scale, potential benefits, or other things we might see when it comes to doing these regular burns, one of which may be, you know, might diversify the microbial communities or change them somehow. I mean, we just don't know how to fix those types of things. Really, I don't think there's been enough work done on those types of things at this point. So, you know, I don't want to give an answer, we just don't know. And I think that's the point. And that's why we're looking at this.

20:57  
Jim: There's certainly as a form of environmental stress, that would be logical that that does have some influence at whatever level, recognizing how chaotic this process is, as you mentioned, your study really looked at controlled burns. And, you know, we've referenced wildfires that have devastated certain parts of the world. But of course, in agricultural settings, burning also has its place and is practiced in various parts of the world. So do you think that those same dynamics of microbial dispersion are happening in those fires in ag settings as well?

21:34  
Jason: It's possible before we did this study, there was a high school student that did a science fair project. And she was actually in Texas and did a science fair project where she actually detected fungi that were coming from, I believe, was from South America. Basically, the what she determined from her project was that they were coming from South America from the agricultural burning that was happening in South America. And this is really the only study of any sort that has ever been done on this type of work prior to the work that we did here in the work that we published an ecosphere. And I think that the large amount of you know, agricultural burning that's done in other parts of the world, and here in Florida, for that matter with sugarcane, and their sugarcane fields are burned regularly in South Florida. And people have been saying for years that they get sick every year, you know, whenever the sugar cane burning happens, whether or not there's any connection between these things, I think, who knows, but I think it's certainly something to look at. I don't see why there wouldn't be certainly I think the microbial dispersal would be very likely in that scenario to see you know, I don't see any reason why it wouldn't. We haven't gotten any samples from those types of scenarios. But the thing that I worry about is fungicide resistant fungi being spread that way, things like Aspergillus. So one of the fungi that we've recovered from our studies, is Aspergillus fumigatus. Aspergillus fumigatus is an emerging fungal pathogen. It's also widespread in agricultural landscapes. And it's developing fungicide resistance due to the widespread use of Aizawl fungicides. It would make sense to me that because it's one of the ones that we're finding in, in the smoke samples, that in these agricultural settings, if you're burning regularly, and you're using Aizawl fungicides, in our situations, are we possible that you would get these fungicide resistant strains, and the people that are gonna be most vulnerable to these types of infections are people that are exposed to these long smoke inundation events? That's exactly the people you don't want to be exposed to fungicide resistant strains of, of Aspergillus fumigatus. That's kind of a scary scenario, but and it might seem very specific, but there's a lot of it in the landscape. And we know that there's more and more of these resistant strains being detected in environmental scenarios, right in the same areas where burning occurs, they've been detected. So anyway, that's just another component.

24:02  
Jim: And building on that human health aspect a moment ago, you mentioned to me, valley fever, and that's brand new to me. So tell us, first of all, what is valley fever? And how do you think this might be connected to wildfires?

24:16  
Jason: Yeah, so valley fever has been, you know, sort of a rapidly growing and emerging fungal disease of humans and in the southeast respiratory disease that has been getting in becoming more and more problematic. Initially, it was really more of a problem for agricultural workers and people like that, but just InStyle affecting much broader population. And it's a soil borne pathogen that is found mostly associated with rodent activity, interestingly, but it says found on certain soil types and parts of central and southern California and to Arizona and those areas. So the fungus that causes there's two species of Cox's COD's Cox videos, images and Cox videos plus a dossier and these are high priority for CDC to determine more on the etiology and epidemiology of this disease. So for us, we were thinking that again, you know, because there's sort of this gap and an understanding of how this disease is spreading, it made sense that potentially this was getting moved around in these big wildfires, again, you know, if it's, if it's in that soil, you have these big fires, moving that dust moving, you know, moving that smoke around, it would be possible. So this one is a little bit difficult to work with, because you can't culture it directly from environmental samples, it has to go through a mammal to in a new hat, and then you've got the blood from the mammal, and you can it produces another spore type in the blood of him handle. So molecular methods are the only way you detect it initially. And then you have to inoculate rabbits or some other mammals to do that. So it's it's a tricky one to work with really tricky. But we have a team member at Kaiser Permanente, who is an epidemiologist who is scouring electronic health records, going back 13 years, you know, he's scouring these electronic health records for about 120,000 fungal infections per year in California. And basically looking for patterns of potential patterns of any kind of interaction between when you have these infections, and when there were wildfire events in looking at sort of the geography of those events, and when these infections happen. So that's part of this project is to just see if there's evidence in the epidemiology data to go along with the sampling that we're doing in the fungal detection work we're doing as well, through that we may see patterns in and things like valley fever as well, you know, the work is ongoing. But, you know, we got some interesting, definitely some interesting results so far. And that's just one of them. There's others like Cryptococcus know, cryptic caucus is another fungus that you know, it's associated with trees to complete its sexual lifecycle. It has to grow on basically the bark or the wood of trees, but it's causing more and more infections in humans, and particularly in the Pacific Northwest, even in immunocompetent individuals. So again, if those those trees are part of a wildfire, which they are, it makes sense that this fungus was shot, and we've detected that fungus multiple times in our smoke samples. So looking at the epidemiology data we want to see okay, is are we seeing peaks of infections and electronic health records to kind of go along with that.

27:27  
Jim: Oh, it's amazing where this research is going. I'm eager to see how the methods evolve and how your your understanding of the importance of smoke and wildfires really matures. Seems like there's a lot there that we need to learn about. I'll mention to the listeners that will post a link to the ecosphere journal article that we just referenced, you can find that at plan topia, podcast.org and Jason. I want to shift gears a little bit now and talk about guacamole. Your research has been really very diverse and we just heard a really good example of it. But another line of research that you're known for is your work on Laurel wilt, which is an exotic disease that has impacted Red Bay and other tree species in the lauraceae family. Tell us a bit more about what Laurel wilt is what red pay is and I guess for that matter what the Loriaca is.

28:22  
Jason: So Laurel wilt is a devastating exotic vascular wealth disease as by the fungal pathogen herring Tonia lauric Allah, it is transmitted by the exotic ambrosia beetle, as I leprous liberate us which is from Asia. It was first discovered here in 2002, near Savannah, Georgia, and has since spread too much of the southeastern United States and now it's as far north as Kentucky. And it has been affecting our native species in the Loray. See, that's the Laurel family includes native species like SassaFrass, bass bush, and then several evergreens species that are we call bays, but are related to avocado. So we have several of these evergreen trees here in the southeast Red Bay swamp Bay soap Bay, it kind of looks almost like a magnolia, but they don't have a beautiful flower. But they do produce a little tiny fruit that looks like a miniature avocado, if you know what that looks like. They're very ecologically important trees very, very important, important culturally too, for the native tribes. And so this disease has just been rapidly decimating the species killing hundreds and hundreds of millions of trees. And there's very little resistance and it's been spreading since 2002. Very similar to the way Dutch elm disease spread through the American American population. So now it's been hitting avocados Well, there's some commercial avocado in South Florida and so it's been devastating to the avocado growers as well. And it certainly threatens the avocado industry elsewhere. It's avascular wilt so the fungus invades a sap wood or or the you know, the vascular tissue, the xylem of the affected trees, it's carried there by this tiny little ambrosia beetle, the ambrosia beetle uses the fungus as assembly on it actually feeds on the fungus. But the beetle appears to be sort of confused, if you will, for lack of a better term. Because normally ambrosia beetles for into trees that are already dead and dying, that's their normal behavior. And then they use those trees as a substrate to cultivate their fungus. But in this case, they're boring into trees that are perfectly healthy, they just make a tiny little pinhole, you know, basically initially, but in the process, they release the spores of the fungus. And it only takes a few days, or you know, to maybe a couple of weeks after that, and the trees start to wilt and die very quickly, the trees basically overreact to the presence of that fungus. So our native North American lorry see die very quickly. So they're, they're very, very susceptible. And it's been just an extremely devastating disease. And it's taken us a while to kind of figure all this biology out, you know, when I first started working on 2006, we didn't even have a name for the disease. And we were sort of trying to figure out how it works. And you know, and trying to come up with management strategies and things at that point, it wasn't even affecting avocado yet.

31:16  
Jim: So what are the management strategies?

31:19  
JasonL Well, I mean, at this point, you know, we spent a lot of time in my lab has spent a lot of time looking at potential resistance, because we have found survivors. So you know, despite the fact that it kills 95 to 99% of mature Red Bay trees, there's still a small percentage out there in the forest that survived, you know, you have to really look for him. But they're there. And we noticed that very early on that there were these residual trees that were there. You know, very early on, we said, Okay, let's take a look at those trees and see if have any resistance, because if they do, then they could be used for restoration to try to, you know, try to enhance the restoration of the future of the species, because there was real concern that the species might go extinct with redbay Well, and also the closely related species, we also thought that if there was resistance, that the whatever the mechanism was, would be important for avocado. And once we found out that avocado was susceptible, so we really put a lot of effort into that. And ultimately, turns out that there is some resistance and we vegetatively propagated those trees, verified that resistance by inoculating trees. And then we've even looked at the heritage of that resistance, we found that some trees produce, you know, seedlings, survivors that seem to display good resistance, and we're trying to verify that further. But we've published a couple of papers on the resistance now and, and what's really promising is that on some of these sites, where you have survivors, you're we're seeing good regeneration around those trees, which even though it's a small percentage, it's something it's showing that there are some residual trees that are going to be able to persist. There are the management strategies for avocado and the avocado groves is a lot of its sanitation, finding those trees early on, that are affected getting rid of them, shipping the trees, because the beetles can't really reproduce very well. And you know, they can't reproduce at all and it ship tree. So if you get the tree early on, ship it get rid of that infested tree, which is very similar to the management strategies that we have for Dutch elm disease and oak will, very similar strategies. But we had to do the science to kind of figure that out. When we've heard talking about fungicide resistance, and Aspergillus, so it's Aizawl, fungicides, pro pecan is all we need is effective, but and you can use it for landscape trees, you know, if you have an individual tree, you're protected every two years, every two to three years, in some cases, once the disease is kind of pressure has gone down. But it's not something we can go and do in the forest. It's just not a reasonable strategy in that case.

33:43  
Jim: Well, such important work. Thank you for doing that.

33:47  
Jason: It's been an interesting journey. And that's just one example of many of these new emerging diseases affecting our native trees, we have new ones that we're working on. I mean, as we speak, new ones are at the very beginning of sort of understanding what they are, and even coming up with names for these fungi. There's a continuous sort of freight train of them coming in into the country. And we need more people working on these things. So if anybody's interested and forest pathogens, forest pathology, I encourage them to come help work on them because you know, there's plenty of job security in this field.

34:20  
Jim: Great plug. Absolutely true. Well, I want to thank you for your time and insights today as it's been a really fun conversation. And as we're closing up, I'm wondering if you have any advice for current or future students other than study horse pathology? Of course, there's good advice, but but what other insights do you have for early career scientists that are interested in plant pathology?

34:44  
Jason: I would say just really stay focused on your goals. Don't listen to people that are negative. You know, if you're gonna hear negative people, you're gonna say all don't go into academia. It's too difficult or it's too competitive or these things if you want to do something, stay focused on it. And don't give up on it. Don't let people tell you otherwise, because you can do things. You don't have to be some special, special person. However, I feel like in a lot of ways, I'm very average in my my success has been largely due to my ability to associate with really good people, and being able to collaborate with great people and find those good teams of people. And keep in mind that that's a huge part of why people are successful is because you have good teams of people that you can collaborate with, and so on, you know, associate with diverse groups of people and build on those on those relationships and use them wisely.

35:37  
Jim: We just heard from Professor Jason Smith of the University of Florida. Jason is a plant pathologist and star of Stranger Things, season four, Episode Five. Thank you so much for listening to plan topia. I'm Jim Bradeen, the host of Plantopia, and I'm looking forward to our conversation next time.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai