Researchers Assemble Pathogen “Tree of Life”

“We’re taking all known Phytophthora species and putting them into a living ‘tree of life’ using the Tree-Based Alignment Selector (T-BAS) toolkit that was developed by my colleague Ignazio Carbone,” says Jean Ristaino, William Neal Reynolds Distinguished Professor of Plant Pathology at North Carolina State University and corresponding author of a paper in the journal PLOS ONE that describes the tool. “Researchers can place emerging threat species into the open-access tree and look at which groups are expanding and evolving.”