Crystal Floyd has been with the University since her undergraduate days. She did a degree that doesn’t even exist anymore, Science in Agriculture, where she took her first plant pathology class and was hooked. She had bounced around between majors for a while but when she learned about the interactions between microbes and plants, she knew she had found her spot. During those undergraduate days, she also got some hands-on experience in plant pathology with a job at the Yard and Garden Clinic at the University. It doesn’t exist anymore, but it was part of Extension, and they would diagnose plant disease for homeowners. After graduation, she stayed on to do a master’s in plant pathology with Dr. Robert Blanchette who studies forest pathology.
After getting her master’s, she ventured out into an industry job, working for a few years for Aveda Corporation in their research labs. She quickly realized that she really missed the University. She had been part of academia so long that it felt like home, and she decided to return. She did a short stint in Dr. Jim Kurle’s lab as a coordinator for a project where they were setting up sentinel plots with extension educators across Minnesota to survey if soybean rust had made its way up from the south of the US where it was causing problems. She was responsible for coordination of the project in addition to her research work. It was the first time she had ever even seen a soybean plant, but it turned out that she really liked agriculture and crops. Eventually the funding for the sentinel plot project ran out when it seemed safe to say that soybean rust wasn’t going to become a major problem in Minnesota and Crystal needed a new position. In a stroke of luck, Dean Malvick had an open position in his lab. She has now been with the department for nearly 20 years, the last 17 as a staff scientist in the Malvick lab.
Dr. Malvick has an extension position which makes the work that they do look a bit different than a strict agricultural research lab. “We work with whatever pathogens are of most importance at the moment,” Crystal says. There is always something different to work on, depending on the needs of the farming community. Most of their work is with soybean but there have been some major diseases that popped up in corn, and thus got added to their workload. “It is different working for somebody in extension because you have to know a little bit about everything because it isn’t just one major project we are working on. Changes will come up suddenly or we won’t be working on a pathogen for a while and then suddenly it becomes a problem, so we pivot back to that. Dean has to be really flexible with what he works on,” she points out. They also do diagnosis of plants during the summer, and her experience in the Yard and Garden Clinic laid some of the groundwork for her work in diagnosis today. The very nature of extension work is so variable day to day that she thinks she could be challenged and engaged here for the rest of her career. “Yeah, it's definitely not boring!” she quips. “It is often challenging trying to juggle all of the different projects and the subject matter changes enough that I could never get bored,” she says. “Dean is just interested in everything, so we will end up with little side projects all the time.”
Some regular pathogens for them are brown stem rot, sudden death syndrome and white mold. Dr. Malvick works with industry a fair amount, as well, testing plant varieties from companies as well as seed treatments. “Knowing that the information from our research then goes directly to those farmers, extension agents and crop consultants is a really nice aspect of my job,” she says, “and that the information is getting where it needs to be.”
Almost all of the pathogens that they study are stem and root diseases. One of their projects right now is testing soybean lines from Aaron Lorenz and his Breeding Program here at the University for brown stem rot (Cadophora gregata), which is a fungal pathogen. Brown stem rot infects early plant stages and is yield reducing, which is a major concern for farmers, for obvious reasons. The interior of the stem should be nice and white, but it turns brown under infection. Out in the field you won’t see symptoms until later in the season. She explains: “You may just have plants that are not performing as well as you thought they would, and you wouldn’t know why unless you cut the plants and split them open to see the brown stem rot. It is pretty subtle because it may not cause visible damage to the leaves, but it can do a lot of damage to the yield, and it is always kind of around. It may not be a very glamorous disease but it’s pretty important. When we do diagnosis of plants during the summer, a lot of times we see brown stem rot or a combination of brown stem rot and other pathogens, which is fascinating. So, it is a big concern for us.”
They only have winter to run the trials, though, because brown stem rot likes cooler conditions, and in the summer, it is just too hot in the greenhouse where they have the controlled conditions they need to run the experiments. Growing in a greenhouse allows them to do these experiments but it also limits how many lines they can screen because of space and time requirements. A workaround that they are exploring is a method to screen plants more quickly. Normally, they have to plant out, wait at least 7 weeks for the symptoms to show up and then split all the stems to determine how bad the infections are. With a lot of trial and error, and a little luck, they are hoping to be able to pull the plants earlier, at three or four weeks, and be able to detect infection with molecular techniques such as quantitative PCR.
In addition to the brown stem rot experiments they have been running, they are also often working on greenhouse projects where they combine pathogens on one plant to see if the pathogens interact in interesting ways. This work was prompted by the plants that they see come into the lab for diagnosis, which can be in terrible shape and have multiple diseases present. They wondered if the pathogens are working together or competing with each other. What they have found is that some of the root rotting pathogens are so aggressive that if you put another pathogen on, the plant basically can’t get any sicker. This work quickly gets quite complicated, though, so they have had to scale back and set up smaller studies to see if these questions are feasible to answer right now, even with pulling in molecular techniques to try to get a handle on how much of each pathogen is present. Next up to bat is a brown stem rot/Diaporthe match up, a combo they see a lot in plants out in the fields and might allow analysis as they aren’t quite as aggressive as some root rotting pathogens.
Crystal really loves the research aspect of her position, but she has found that she also really enjoys being involved with training graduate students, helping them to hone their skills, and having an influence on what they do down the line. She chose her own career path specifically because she didn’t want to be pulled out of the lab as much as being a P.I. would have required. Working in the Malvick lab for so long has afforded her the joy of being knee deep in the research as well as some independence and influence about what the lab works on, and that provides a lot of job satisfaction. If she were suddenly freed from the exciting but shifting winds of Extension work, though, and had to choose just one pathogen to focus on for the rest of her career, it would be the enigmatic Diaporthe. The mysterious nature of Diaporthe may be because they are such generalists. They don’t have to occur on just soybean plants and in some cases, they just sit on plants as epiphytes, not causing any disease at all, and what triggers it to become a pathogen is not really known. “It is so complicated, you know, there's multiple species and lots of different disease symptoms and I think that could keep somebody busy for a long time,” she says.
Like many others in agricultural work, she worries about the drought that has been prevalent for several years now. Just last summer on the St. Paul campus they saw a lot of charcoal rot, which isn’t usual here, because it was so dry. She says: “It could really change what we work on, you know? The diseases will change depending on how dry or how hot it is. And it also changes how we have to do our research, because a lot of the diseases that we work on need moisture, so at least some of our fields in the summer have to be irrigated now. When there is so much drought over a long enough period, the diseases that are problematic now could change, so right now we are thinking about what disease we may have to shift to that could become more problematic if it continues to be dry.” This all poses a challenge because the lab’s funding depends upon what the farmers are concerned about currently, which may not match what the upcoming issues could be. Keeping a foot on the ground right now as well as one in future makes for a tricky balance, but one that Crystal and the rest of the Malvick lab work hard to strike every day.
