Announcement

Oak Wilt Diagnostic Kits Now Available to Academic and State Labs

Greetings Oak Wilt Testing Community, 

At PureBIoX we are excited to announce that, thanks to a recent partnership with the University of Minnesota, our oak wilt rapid detection kit -- AgroLAMP™ Oak Wilt Kit -- will be free of charge for academic and state laboratories for the 2025 season. More details can be found here.

Released: 2024 Lab Capacity and Impact Evaluation Survey Analysis

NPDN would like to announce the release of the 2024 Lab Capacity and Impact Evaluation Survey Answers Report. The NPDN Annual Lab Capacity And Impact Evaluation survey is a questionnaire designed to survey the diagnostic capacity, capability, and contributions of diagnostic labs in NPDN. The 2024 survey received 73 responses from NPDN labs in 53 states and territories. View the 2024 answers analysis HERE

Looking for specimens of rust fungi in collaboration with the European Union National Reference Laboratories

Dear NPDN friends,

My colleague Pedro Pablo Parra, a former postdoc in my lab and now a Project Manager at the European Union National Reference Laboratories, is seeking specimens from the following genera of rust fungi: Chrysomyxa, Cronartium, Gymnosporangium, and Melampsora.

If you are working with these genera, have specimens available, or can connect me with individuals who routinely collect them, please let me know.

USDA APHIS PPQ Plant Pathogen Diagnostics Certification Program onboarding new labs

USDA APHIS PPQ’s Plant Pathogen Diagnostics Certification Program (PPDCP) is onboarding new labs for program participation.

Onboarding typically includes an introductory meeting, submitting records that demonstrate your lab’s established quality and biosafety systems, a virtual walkthrough, a “pretest” consisting of small sample sets, and finally, proficiency testing to certify the lab’s diagnosticians.

MFIT/PPCDL Registration Deadline Approaching - 11-27-24

The MFIT and PPCDL Workshop Registration Request Form submission deadline is quickly approaching. The forms must be submitted by close of business on Wednesday, November 27, 2024. Please submit your requests soon if you are hoping to attend a workshop in 2025.

What’s the next step? Workshop invitations will be sent out as participants are selected. The workshop coordinators will send out a listserv notice when the first invitations are sent out so applicants can be on the lookout.

USDA mycology lab searching for specimens of Pseudocerradoa on Monstera

To determine the distribution and diversity of the rust Pseudocerradoa on Monstera species (e.g., Swiss cheese plant, split-leaf philodendron, five-holes plant, etc.), the USDA Mycology and Nematology Genetic Diversity and Biology Laboratory is seeking fresh specimens from across the United States. Symptoms of this disease include small chlorotic leaf spots that expand and become brown to reddish-brown, often with a yellow halo, and uredinia with abundant urediniospores (Urbina et al., 2023) (Figure 1).

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