BATON ROUGE — The LSU AgCenter received a $1.5 million grant to study hidden links among crop diseases on Tuesday.

Farmers often battle leaf spot diseases caused by fungi, with plant pathologists searching for fungicides and other practices to limit the negative effect on crops. 

The harmful fungi are part of the genus Cercospora, which includes species that cause diseases that have concerned farmers for years. The diseases often present as leaf spots that stress and defoliate plants, leading to losses.

Developing a stable taxonomy based on DNA will be the primary goal of LSU AgCenter plant pathologists Vinson Doyle and Jonathan Richards.

“We can understand which genes each species has and how much overlap there is between these different species,” Richards said. “For example, if we’re interested in understanding how multiple Cercospora species have evolved to infect soybean, we can compare the genomes of all these different Cercospora species and identify genes that might be specific to species that have the ability to infect soybean.”

Richards plans to use the same process to find out how species adapt to different environments over time as well as the mechanisms they use to infect plants.