Community Corner
Who's Who: Combatting Killer Citrus Disease, Wheat Allergens at the USDA
Every week we'll feature a brief chat with someone who lives, works or plays in Albany.
Name: Bill Belknap
Age: 56
Occupation: Research leader of the Crop Improvement and Utilization Research Unit at the
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What do you do? The group works on a real diverse set of commodities. For example, we’re working with guayule [a desert plant] to make a domestic source of rubber. There’s a private-sector plant that is making latex out of guayule in Tucson. We’re trying to supply a strategic material to the United States. That’s one project.
On the other extreme, we work on disease resistance in crops, mostly citrus, which is facing a serious problem. The disease Huanglongbing (HLB) [or citrus greening disease] came here out of Asia. It’s spread by the Asian citrus psillid, which has just arrived in California in the last few months.
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The problem is there’s no natural resistance. It arrived in Florida in 2006; by 2008 every citrus-growing region of Florida was affected. It takes about 10 years to kill a tree. It infects the vascular tissue of the plant.
If spraying won’t work, how do you attack HLB? My lab does the molecular biology part. This particular strategy is building genes to combat the bacteria. Just about as fast as we can think things up, they’re willing to try it. Because it’s food, we want to be able to modify the plant, but we don’t want to introduce anything foreign to the plant. Everything is from citrus.
Would it be considered GMO (genetically modified organisms)? That question is being reviewed by the regulatory agency in Washington.
We’re operating under tight time constraints. With HLB we have a very narrow window of time before you’ll start to see an economic impact in Florida. HLB is a big problem everywhere in the world. Everybody’s working on a lot of different strategies.
Then we have two labs that work on wheat and how to get the best quality for whatever use. We’ve got a project to get rid of the allergen epitopes – to identify which proteins have them and get rid of them.
How long have you been in Albany? I live in Albany and have for the last 24 years. I came here for the lab. Everyone thinks we inspect meat or something!
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