Research Projects

Ag and food waste are rich in energy, water, and nutrients. We can convert waste into valuable by-products that promote a circular economy within agri-food systems while diverting waste from landfills. Our project evaluates how agricultural and food waste can be transformed into valuable by-products like biochar (From almond waste) and Bokashi (From several Ag & food wastes). Farmers face challenges of disease, climate stress, and rising costs. We developed a project that utilizes these by-products to enhance soil carbon sequestration and support the native soil and plant microbiome, improving soil and plant health and resilience. Our methods include amending soil mixes and utilizing irrigation systems in greenhouses and fields to showcase the potential for soil carbon enhancement and the positive effects on plant vitality.
We aim to demonstrate these sustainable practices' environmental and economic benefits, along with education and outreach to encourage farmer adoption. This initiative represents a significant step towards sustainable farming, leveraging waste to create effective soil amendments for a more resilient agricultural future.

The Citrus Clonal Protection Program (CCPP) provides disease-free citrus propagative materials to support California's citrus industry. They are validating a modular plant growth unit (MPGU) made from a recycled shipping container designed for citrus to increase CCPP's plant production capacity. This project aims to optimize disease symptom expression for citrus diagnostics and research on graft-transmissible diseases bioindexing. The project aims to increase the volume of citrus plants for CCPP disease testing, therapy, and budwood sources and reduce production time for disease-free citrus varieties. More importantly, the project will allow the creation of automated and sustainable citrus nursery technologies that growers can adopt and use less space, energy,  fertilizer, and water, but that also reduce environmental impact.

As the HLB citrus disease becomes more widespread, it is crucial to detect it early and accurately. Unfortunately, current detection methods such as qPCR have limitations in the volume of plant tissue that can be sampled, leading to undersampling and under-testing for the bacteria causing the disease. Plus, the sporadic distribution of infected leaves and high labor and equipment costs make it difficult to scale up existing methods.

To address these challenges, Technology Evolving Solutions (TES) and Citrus Clonal Protection Program (CCPP) have collaborated to create the Budwood Tissue Extractor (BTE), a novel, specialized instrument that processes citrus budwood bark tissues rapidly. This innovative tool helps to resolve the labor-intensive sample preparation methods while offering a higher-throughput, more cost-effective solution.

The BTE marks a significant advancement in citrus disease detection, demonstrating the potential to enhance sample throughput and reduce equipment costs in citrus diagnostic labs. The rapid plant tissue processing protocol and BTE can benefit several citrus diagnostic laboratories and programs in California and serve as a model system for tissue processing in other woody perennial crops worldwide.

The long-term goal of this project is to improve the economics, productivity, and sustainability of California’s specialty crops by accelerating the plant-engineering process.  Although plant transformation and clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR)-based editing has and will continue to revolutionize agriculture by creating crops with beneficial properties, there are still well-recognized bottlenecks in these processes. The expected outcome of this project is to overcome some of these bottlenecks by using metabolic models to increase the growth rate of citrus in two important steps of the engineering process. We also expect that this project will have broader impacts by providing a blueprint to accelerate the plant engineering process for other California specialty crop industries. Finally, since metabolic models have been shown to enhance breeding programs by improving the prediction accuracy of molecular markers, the models constructed by this project could have considerable value beyond the specific goals of this project.

The long-term goal of this project is to develop strategies to manage citrus Huanglongbing (HLB). This disease has recently caused annual losses of over 1 billion dollars and 7,900 jobs in Florida. Production volumes in FL have also decreased by approximately 74% over the last two decades, which has been primarily attributed to HLB. Roughly two-thirds of the FL juicing plants have been closed and the industry is getting close to a complete collapse. Since similar effects happen in California, new and more effective management strategies are urgently needed. This project is to use a model-driven approach to understand a process that is causing natural HLB control, and then use that knowledge to create new, effective, and sustainable HLB control strategies. This natural process occurs in Survivor Trees in Florida – where diseased trees have becoming healthy over a several year period. Because these management strategies will based on a natural phenomenon, we expect the management strategies that are derived from this work will creation of more environmentally friendly management strategies more environmentally friendly and move through the regulation process in an expeditious manner.

This project is to create effective prophylactic and curative Huanglongbing (HLB) treatments (Objective 1). Our approach will use the citrus tristeza virus (CTV) to deliver antimicrobial peptides to the habitat (phloem) of the putative HLB pathogen (CLas). To substantially increase the efficacy of this approach, we are borrowing an approach used in human infectious disease, which engineers antimicrobial peptides to specifically target the designated microbes. This approach can increase the efficacies of antimicrobial peptides by orders of magnitude, with some being able to kill greater than 500 times more bacteria, which we expect will transform an HLB treatment that is minimally to

moderately effective into one that is highly effective. This project will also create an in silico metabolic model of the HLB pathosystem, which will enable a systems-biology-based understanding of CLas, citrus and the Asian citrus psyllid, along with their interactions (Objective 2). This model will provide researchers, engineers and agribusinesses with a powerful suite of tools and an unprecedented base of knowledge – which we expect will enable them to create (i) anti-CLas molecules, (ii) HLB-

tolerant/resistant citrus (iii) early detection methods as well as (iv) media and conditions to cultivate CLas in vitro. Our project will also perform analyses to determine if our HLB management solutions will be economically feasible (Objective 3), and it will implement an extension and outreach program (Objective 4) for scientists and citrus stakeholders.

California's farms are famous for their specialty crops like citrus, avocados, and grapes. But, these vital crops are under threat from diseases like Huanglongbing (also known as citrus greening) and curly top virus, putting the future of California's agriculture at risk. To tackle this, researchers at the University of California, Riverside, are working on an innovative project. They're developing a new tool that makes it easier to collect genetic material from plants right in the field. This tool will help farmers and scientists quickly detect diseases and the tiny organisms that cause them, including bacteria, viruses, and viroids.

The team, led by Professor Hideaki Tsutsui is putting this device to the test on three major crops and against three types of pathogens to ensure it works well. They'll validate its performance using advanced lab tests to confirm it can accurately identify infected plants. This isn't just about creating a tool; it's about bringing it into the hands of those who need it most. The project includes training for farmers and others in the agriculture sector, using presentations and hands-on workshops at local events and through a dedicated website. This effort aims to safeguard California's agriculture by ensuring crops stay healthy and productive for years to come.