News Stories

In the News

A common Barcelonas hazelnut tree which produces most nuts found in stores.

Ken Johnson joins OPB with more details on the new disease-resistant cultivar of Eastern Filber Blight and what it could mean for Oregon’s multimillion-dollar hazelnut industry.


Scientist man standing with cereal grass

Christopher Mundt is retiring after nearly 40 years in the botany field at Oregon State University, having led research in plant resistance and disease control in addition to teaching future botanists at OSU.


chia seeds and a graph of it's genome assembly

Chia, a tiny seed from Southern Mexico and Central America, might just be the next big thing in healthy eating!


A graphic showing Populus tree fungal data across the continental US

A collaborative project between Posy Busby and the Peay Lab at Stanford University explores above- and belowground fungal biodiversity of Populus trees across the continental United States.


Biological and Physical Sciences

NASA announces the award of eleven grants or cooperative agreements for exciting new Space Biology research that will advance NASA’s understanding of how exposure to lunar dust/regolith impact both plant and animal systems.


a pink flower in the prairie

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced Monday that Nelson’s checker-mallow will be coming off the Endangered Species list 30 days after the upcoming notice appears in the Federal Register.


agriculture scientist talks about cover crops in a field

Preliminary research regarding cover cropping as part of the Resilient Dryland Farming Alliance will be presented during the October Climate Conversation Program.


scientist speaking in front of field of cereal grains

Chris Mundt started at OSU in 1985, and has spent 38 years working on disease resistance in wheat.


Chris Mundt at a Hyslop Farm Field Day in Corvallis, OR.  Phtoto Mitch Lies

Chris Mundt started at OSU in 1985, and has spent 38 years working on disease resistance in wheat.


map showing origin and distribution of strawberry

High-quality genomes of the cultivated strawberry’s progenitors provide the strongest evidence to date for the identity and chromosomal composition of the four subgenomes of octoploid strawberry.


These color shifts, though subtle to the human eye, have occurred over 56% of the world’s oceans — an expanse that is larger than the total land area on Earth. Photot: Courtesy from OSU

The ocean’s color has changed significantly over the last 20 years, and the global trend is likely a consequence of human-induced climate change, scientists, including one from Oregon State University, report in a new study.


The Frisian Islands archipelago

The ocean’s color has changed significantly over the last 20 years, and the global trend is likely a consequence of human-induced climate change, scientists, including one from Oregon State University, report in a new study.


Last year's good crop provided the Oregon Wheat Commission with a "much more substantial source of revenue to work with" in adopting its budget for the coming year, its CEO says.


USDA logo

Sens. Ron Wyden and Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., announced Tuesday that Oregon State University will receive more than $642,000 from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to build out a tool that diagnoses invasive diseases in native plants.


USDA: United States Department of Agriculture

Sens. Ron Wyden and Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., announced Tuesday that Oregon State University will receive more than $642,000 from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to build out a tool that diagnoses invasive diseases in native plants.


Stripe rust on winter wheat.  Credit Christina Hagerty

Oregon State University Extension Service and research faculty in Morrow and Umatilla counties are working with growers and looking at the effectiveness of new fungicides.


China dust terramodis 01 april 2002. credit: NASA Earth Observatory

New research led by an Oregon State University scientist begins to unravel the role dust plays in nourishing global ocean ecosystems while helping regulate atmospheric carbon dioxide levels.


Pears

What's being done to help pear growers keep their crop safe after harvest?  Oregon State University's Achala KC updates us on the latest research taking place in southern Oregon.


M.S. student Kate Baldino from Gent lab (USDA-ARS Horticultural Crops Disease and Pest Management Research Unit) and Department of Botany and Plant Pathology received the Larry Moore Award for Graduate Research.


The Ph.D. student, Lester Núñez from the Zasada lab (USDA-ARS Horticultural Crops Disease and Pest Management Research Unit) and Department of Botany and Plant Pathology received the Larry Moore Award for Graduate Research.


Trent Berrian, a Master student in the Goyer Lab, was awarded the Drs. James A. and Stella Melugin Coakley Endowment Award and the Western Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Graduate Student Grant.


Melodie Putnam received the Lifetime Achievement Award! Walt Mahaffee received the Distinguished Service Award; and Christina Hagerty received the Early Career Award.  Wonderful news for three very deserving plant pathologists. Also, Hannah...


The Biological Data Sciences program congratulates Sophie Baur and Riely White, class of 2022 and the first two to graduate with a Bachelor of Science degree in BDS.


Posy Busby

Also on April 1, Dr. Posy Busby became a co-signatory PI on the Andrews Forest LTER grant....


This is a story about passion. And commitment. And family. It’s also a story about plants.


Join us for our Botany and Plant Pathology Graduate Student Research Celebration event on May 6, 2022 in a new hybrid format! Graduate students will present their research in-person to both a live and online audience.


Melodie Putnam (Oregon State University Plant Clinic) received funding from the Western Region’s IPM Center for a project entitled “Use of Whole Genome Sequencing in Disease Diagnostic Laboratories can Enhance Risk Mitigation.” 


This paper introduces and reviews how the newly emerging discipline of paleo-evolutionary/developmental plant biology has begun to fully integrate phylogenetic pattern with the genetic processes that underlie and implement plant evolution. It...


Tetrastichia reconstruction

Reconstructing the Tetrastichia bupatides Gordon plant; a Lower Carboniferous/Devonian (Tournaisian) hydrasperman gymnosperm from Oxroad Bay, Scotland and Ballyheigue, Ireland.


BPP graduate students (from left to right) Rachel Baschieri, Alex Wong, Sarah Lowder, and Conner Rogan harvest and crush Pinot noir grapes from a research plot after this year's vineyard research concluded. Cheers to a great field season!


The Jaiswal and Naithani labs in the Department of Botany and Plant Pathology, in the College of Agricultural Sciences at Oregon State University, developed the most comprehensive Transcriptome Atlas from the Chia (Salvia hispanica).


Alex Wong, a PhD student in the Mahaffee lab with the USDA-ARS Horticultural Crops Research Unit and Department of Botany and Plant Pathology, was awarded the Western Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Graduate Student grant.


The lichen team at OSU, in collaboration with colleagues at Duke University and the University of Liège,...


Graduated OSU BPP PhD student Catie Wram was awarded the 2021 Webster Outstanding Graduate Student in Nematology. Catie presented a seminar at the annual meeting of Society of Nematologist meeting in Gulf Shores, Alabama on Sept 15, 2021 as...


Valerian Dolja and colleagues published a paper detailing an operational definition of virus, and exploring the virosphere as a multidimensional parameter space home to viruses and other replicators.


The grant aims to cultivate future academic, industry, or government leaders who can solve emerging agricultural challenges of the 21st century. Nick's award will support his research on evolutionary genomics of the sudden oak death pathogen, ...


Congratulations to Nik Grünwald, USDA-ARS-Horticultural Crops Research Unit and Department of Botany and Plant Pathology, who was elected as incoming vice president of the American Phytopathological Society and will serve as its president for...


Congratulations to Dr. Ying Chang.  Ying is a postdoc in the laboratories of Joey Spatafora and Jared LeBoldus.  She will start a new tenure-track Assistant Professor position at Yale-NUS (National University of Singapore) in Life Sciences,...


Conner Rogan, a PhD candidate in Jeff Anderson’s lab, is a co-author of a study entitled “Arabidopsis group C Raf-like protein kinases negatively regulate abscisic acid signaling and are direct substrates of SnRK2” that was recently published...


Congratulations to Jeremiah Dung, President, and Christina Hagerty, President-Elect, for their leadership in the APS Pacific Division.  Also, a big congratulations to Jay Pscheidt for the Lifetime Achievement Award, and Alex Wong and Chelsea...


Congratulations to OregonFlora.  A recipient of the Museum of Natural and Cultural History's Oregon Stewardship Award, OregonFlora is recognized for its statewide work in documenting the diversity and relevance of Oregon's plant life. 


OSU Student Elaine Swanson

Congratulations to Elaine Swanson for being a finalist for the 2021 Goddard Keynote Scholarship, offered by the National Space Club and Foundation!


Lynda Ciuffetti

Congratulations to Professor Emeritus Lynda Ciuffetti for receiving the Purdue University Woman Scholar Award. Lynda received her PhD from Purdue U., Department of Botany and Plant Pathology, her MS from Michigan Technological U., and BS from U...


Red needle cast disease, caused by Phytophthora pluvialis, has had a significant impact on radiata pine plantations in New Zealand for over a decade. The LeBoldus Lab at OSU and the Grunwald lab at the USDA-ARS in Corvallis, Oregon collaborated...


Jennie Green is a senior in our Ecampus Botany degree and lives in Verlot, WA.  ­She has recently published an article in the Spring 2021 issue of Douglasia: Mountaineering and Botanizing on the Ptarmigan Traverse: A Rare Plant Monitoring...


Recently, Naithani (BPP, OSU) and Jaiswal lab (BPP, OSU) jointly published a research article “Beyond gene ontology (GO): using biocuration approach to improve the gene nomenclature and functional annotation of rice S-domain kinase...


Max Combest (2020 BPP Master student graduate in Aymeric Goyer lab, in collaboration with Jeff Anderson at OSU and Kiwamu Tanaka at Washington State University) is lead author on a new paper in the Journal of Experimental Botany, currently...


Jaiswal lab's contribution on the draft haplotype‐phased assembly of the genome of a popular hop (Humulus Lupulus) cultivar cascade was recently published in The Plant Genome journal.


Viruses are ubiquitous, essential components of any ecosystem, and of multicellular organism holobionts. Numerous viruses cause acute infection, killing the host or being cleared by immune system. In many other cases, viruses coexist with the...


Researchers from Oregon State University and the University of Arizona in the USA, University of Liverpool and EMBL’s European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) in the UK, and CGIAR’s International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines...


Jasmine Brandes doing lab work

We're now accepting applications for the new Biocomputing and Research Internship! Learn more about our faculty mentors and 2021 projects for the summer undergraduate internship program. Applications due Feb 26!


The Department of Botany and Plant Pathology (BPP) is pleased to invite applicants for the BPP Diversity Advancement Graduate Assistantship. BPP provides funding for a graduate assistantship to increase the ethnic and cultural diversity in...


Oregon State University scientist Fritzi Grevstad of the Department of Botany and Plant Pathology in the College of Agricultural Sciences petitioned the USDA to use the insects and led the...


Oregon’s Agricultural Progress magazine highlighted the USDA NIFA research grant that will fund the research of Posy Busby and Devin Leopold in the Department of Botany and Plant Pathology.

Read the feature story below:


Jeremiah Dung, together with co-Project Director Jeff Chang, have been awarded a $2.9 million Specialty Crops Research Initiative grant from the USDA-NIFA.


If you missed Alexandra Weisberg's Phytobiomes Alliance webinar (07/09/2020), you can view the recording! 


Megan O’Malley receives a pre-doctoral fellowship from the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, USDA.


Alexandra Weisberg (Jeff Chang lab) is lead author on a new paper published in Science. Read the OSU News story "...


A new paper "Phytopathogenic Rhodococcus Have Diverse Plasmids With Few Conserved Virulence Functions" from the Jeff Chang lab was published this week in Frontiers in Microbiology.