Ash Dieback MONITOR ..

Nurseries infected with the deadly fungus set to wipe out Britain’s 80m ash trees have been removed from the official map of the outbreak the Guardian can reveal, after nursery owners complained that being identified might hurt their business.

Officials said permitting anonymity encourages nursery owners to come forward and report infections, but critics say concealing the identity of infected nurseries means the public and scientists trying to fight the epidemic do not have the full facts.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/dec/23/ash-dieback-infected-nurseries-map

Thousands of deer are to be shot to save ash trees from a killer disease.

About 400,000 animals are normally culled every year to keep numbers down.

But conservationists believe thousands more must go to allow young ash saplings to grow and replace the trees suffering from ash dieback disease, Chalara fraxinea.

‘We will use a combination of fencing and deer management. But if you simply use fencing, deer just push through or decimate neighbouring woodland.’

The RSPCA said a cull would be acceptable if overgrazing threatened the landscape.

According to Kraj, W., Zarek, M. & Kowalski, T. (2012) there are several strains of C. fraxinea in Poland.

As has been widely reported, ash dieback is now established in Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Baltic Russia (Kaliningrad), Finland, Sweden, Denmark and Germany, as well as Poland and these are all countries with a Baltic shore. The fungus is also now widespread in southern Norway, just outside the Baltic.

In the south the disease has advanced steadily across central Europe as far as France, Italy, Romania and other countries.

The terrestrial route seems consistent with propagation mainly by airborne spores of the H. pseudoalbidus stage and maps produced in France illustrate this well.  In following the advance of C. fraxinea, it is important to try and discover the first reports in different areas as (a) the fungus spreads very rapidly and (b) once discovered far more people start looking for it. Also it has to be borne in mind that it may have been present for some years before being detected. Because of this and other factors, possible dispersal routes become unclear quickly.

The terrestrial route seems consistent with propagation mainly by airborne spores of the H. pseudoalbidus stage and maps produced in France illustrate this well.  In following the advance of C. fraxinea, it is important to try and discover the first reports in different areas as (a) the fungus spreads very rapidly and (b) once discovered far more people start looking for it. Also it has to be borne in mind that it may have been present for some years before being detected. Because of this and other factors, possible dispersal routes become unclear quickly.

increasingly suggestions are being made that the pathogen has been present in Britain and elsewhere since well before its first report and, if this is correct, at least some nursery stock may have been infected from local woodlands after importation.

So far as the British Isles is concerned, virtually all the current records of Chalara from the wider environment (i.e. not from nurseries or recent plantings) are on the eastern side of the country, many close to the coast. While wind borne spores from mainland Europe may be responsible for many of these outbreaks, most are also near ports, places where there are many arrivals and departures of people and goods to and from other countries. This is particularly apparent in the area around Dover and Folkestone (Forestry Commission, 2012).

A Queen Mary scientist will embark on a new project to decode the ash tree’s entire genetic sequence in the hope of stopping Britain’s trees from being completely devastated by the Chalara ash dieback fungal disease.

Project leader, Dr Richard Buggs from Queen Mary’s School of Biological and Chemical Sciences, said: ‘Sequencing the ash genome is a foundational step towards discovering the genetic basis of resistance to ash dieback: the future of ash trees in Britain may depend on this. At Queen Mary, University of London we will build on our experience of sequencing the birch genome to optimise this ash genome project.’

A small percentage of ash trees in Denmark are showing some resistance to the fungus. By decoding the tree’s genetic sequence, scientists will take a crucial first step towards identifying the genes that confer this resistance.

The researchers expect to have a first draft of the tree’s entire genetic sequence by August 2013. Once sequencing is complete, they plan to make it publicly available for use by other researchers.

http://www.qmul.ac.uk/media/news/items/se/88532.html

The Forestry Commission has used Huddle’s cloud collaboration services in a project to control the spread of a tree disease known as ash dieback.

The organisation started using Huddle’s cloud-based collaboration software as a result of an existing relationship between Huddle and the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra).

The software enables multiple organisations and the people within those organisations to work and share documents in real time. It automatically updates documents after they are changed so the final version is available.

the cloud-based nature of the Huddle tool meant it could be set up quickly, without the need for IT resources, and it offered a pay-as-you-go model.

http://www.computerweekly.com/news/2240174978/Forestry-Commission-uses-the-cloud-to-fight-tree-disease

There is a lesson from this first dataset. Whenever new or suspect plant diseases arise we should immediately sequence transcriptomes from field collected diseased tissue. These days the cost of an RNAseq lane is reasonable and the assemblies are pretty decent. The data generated should rapidly provide valuable information about the nature of the pathogen and offer an initial insight into its genes. Whenever time is of the essence, transcriptome sequencing should be initiated as soon as possible.

We decided early on in this project that speed would be a critical driver given the emergency nature of the problem. We decided that we should generate genetic sequences as rapidly as possible, release them to the community, and prompt the crowdsourcing exercise we have been publicizing since Friday.

http://oadb.tsl.ac.uk/?p=254

Although there is no evidence of Chalara at the nursery, it has been banned from moving or selling the saplings as part of government action to prevent the spread of the disease.

A committee of MPs has now launched an inquiry to look at ash dieback and the way it has been handled.

Leader the inquiry, Anne McIntosh MP, told BBC Inside Out that Britain’s tree industry, which was importing saplings from Europe, needs to look at itself.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-20680983