X-Nico

unusual facts about rice blast



Frances Meehan Latterell

During her career as research plant pathologist, US army biological laboratories, Fort Detrick, Maryland and plant pathologist, US Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Research Service, Frederick, Maryland, she conducted extensive research on cereal diseases, including gray leaf spot of corn and rice blast.

Plant disease resistance

Plants in both natural and cultivated populations carry inherent disease resistance, but there are numerous examples of devastating plant disease impacts (see Irish Potato Famine, Chestnut blight), as well as recurrent severe plant diseases (see Rice blast, Soybean cyst nematode, Citrus canker).

Project AGILE

The late author Sheldon H. Harris in his book Factories of Death: Japanese Biological Warfare, 1932-1945, and the American cover up wrote that field tests for wheat rust and rice blast were conducted throughout 1961 in Okinawa and at "at several sites in the midwest and south", although these were probably part of Project 112.


see also

Kasugamycin

Kasugamycin was discovered by Hamao Umezawa, who also discovered kanamycin and bleomycin, as a drug which could prevent growth of a fungus causing rice blast disease.