Facilities

Laboratories

In 1993, the Department of Plant Pathology, University of Arizona began occupying space in the new Marley building. The move to this facility was completed in 1995. The Marley building was built to meet the challenges of contemporary research in plant biology, including plant pathology, plant science, and entomology. The building is equipped with the most up to date computer installations, fixed chemical hoods in all laboratories, and biosafety cabinets in some.

Equipment

In addition to modern laboratories, it has common facilities for housing equipment such as centrifuges, spectrophotometers, PCR, CHEF electrophoresis, electroporator, HPLC, GC, incubators, growth chambers, etc. Specialized laboratories include tissue culture lab/gene gun, cell sorting laboratory, peptide and nucleic acid sequencing facility, genomics laboratories, and a variety of specialized microscopes. The major University electron microscope facility is in the basement of Marley with both transmission and scanning electron microscopes with preparation facilities and darkrooms.

Greenhouses

Two greenhouse ranges are available to plant pathology department members. One is on campus with specialized security measures designed to safely house transgenic plants and microbes in biotechnology research. The other is off campus and provides large greenhouses for more comprehensive plant associated research. These greenhouses, as with the transgenic ones on campus, have automatic watering and computerized climate control systems.

Research Centers

There are nine agricultural research centers associated with the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences in Arizona. These include both plant and animal research. They vary from the VbarV, a typical western 88 section cattle ranch in central Arizona to the ultramodern Maricopa Agricultural Center(MAC) in south central Arizona. At MAC, modern laboratories are available along with greenhouses and cotton gins and 2100 acres of farm land divided between research(460 acres) and a demostration farm of 1440 acres. The most unique feature of MAC is its 80 acre irrigation experiment station with capabilities of delivering water to crops in a variety of ways. MAC is considered to be premier desert agricultural research center in the world, and is accessible by air. The other major off campus research center is in Yuma with a variety of facilities emphasizing research on citrus, vegetables, and field crops.

Agricultural setting

The main crop production area in Arizona is in the lower third of the state. It is physically associated with the Sonoran plateau which also includes the state of Sonora and Baja California in Mexico. There are many similarities of cropping systems in Arizona, northern Mexico, and the Imperial Valley of California, including plant diseases. It is an arid area, so the dominant types of plant diseases are caused by soil borne pathogens and insect vectored viruses. Powdery mildews are common on a variety of crops and moisture requiring down mildews, leaf spots, blights, rusts and smuts/bunts, while they do occur, are less frequently encountered.

Forest tree diseases are found commonly in the 13 million acres of coniferous forests in higher elevations and in the trees and cacti at the lower elevations of the Sonoran desert. Many of the forest pathogens are represented in the Mycological Herbarium located in the Department of Plant Pathology.