The 48th Annual American Peanut Research and Education Society annual meeting convened in Clearwater, Fla., this week with hundreds of scientists, student researchers and representatives of the shelling, processing and manufacturing industries gathering. Over two-full days of meetings, the group is reviewing the progress of genomics research, sharing findings with colleagues and discussing priorities for future research. 
After a day of committee meetings on Tuesday, the conference opened Wednesday with speakers stressing the importance of research to stave off disease threats and allow quick response when agriculture is threatened.
When APRES met in Mobile, Ala. in 1984, the conference included a special session on the peanut stripe virus, which seemed to pose a threat to the industry at the time.
“I think we’ve survived stripe virus well, but had we been able to foresee the freight train barreling down on us, we might have chosen a different topic,” said Dr. Tim Brenneman, a professor of plant pathology at the University of Georgia.
Within a year of that meeting, tomato spotted wilt virus (TSWV) would threaten to destroy peanuts in the Southeastern United States.
“It wasn’t just a game-changer. It was nearly a game-ender,” Brenneman said in his talk, titled “Peanut Diseases from an International Perspective – Potential Game-Changers.”
While PStV wasn’t as big a threat as originally feared, in 1985, TSWV caused 50% losses in Texas; the next year, Mississippi peanut farmers had huge losses, as well.
By 1986, the disease had shown up in peanut in Alabama and Georgia.
“TSWV almost put us out of business,” Brenneman said.
The industry and research community responded, developing the Spotted Wilt Risk Index and changing the way farmers grew peanuts in the U.S. Promising varieties under development at the time fell by the wayside if they didn’t have resistance to TSWV, Brenneman said. No other trait mattered if the plant couldn’t fight the virus.
Disaster was avoided, but other diseases could be on the horizon and cause similar crisis.
Peanut growers might draw lessons from the citrus industry, the keynote speaker from APRES’ opening session suggested.
The citrus industry continues to fight citrus greening, a disease that has infected nearly every tree in Florida and threatens to end the industry. In just a few years, HLB or Huanglongbing, has led to 40% production loss, even as farmers take on double the costs to keep trees alive and productive.
The disease has a long latency period, so by the time scientists identified it in Florida trees a few years ago, they were caught flat-footed to fight it, said Robert Shatters, a molecular biologist with the USDA-ARS Horticulture Lab in Fort Pierce, Fla.
“We knew the disease would come, but we didn’t prepare well,” Shatters said in his talk “Stories from the Frontline of the War on Citrus.”
Dealing with a plant that has little genetic diversity, researchers are working with a program of different interventions – from killing the bacteria that causes the disease deep in the tree, to disabling the psyllid that serves as a vector to infect trees with the bacteria to creating resistant varieties that consumers might accept.
In the meantime, HLB combined with earlier canker disease has destroyed the lime industry, and shrank the grapefruit industry by 80% and the orange industry by 72%, Shatter said.
Processors have closed and some predict the citrus industry in Florida could be gone by 2019, he said.
The HLB response has lessons, Shatter said:
- Start researching disease before it appears in the U.S.
- Be aggressive in monitoring.
- Be prepared to manage a disease if you can’t eliminate it.
And while the peanut industry has successfully fought TSWV, other game-changers may be on the horizon, said Brenneman, the UGA professor.
Among the potential threats, Brenneman said, are:
- Groundnut ring spot virus (GRSV), which was found on tomatoes in Florida beginning in 2009.
- Smut, which is found in South America and doesn’t respond to any known fungicides.
- A mysterious wilt appearing on peanuts in Nicaragua, and
- Tomato chlorotic spot virus, which was found in tomato in Florida in 2012. The Peanut & Mycotoxin Innovation Lab team discovered TCSV in peanut in 2015 in Haiti and are collecting data that may be vital if the disease infects peanuts elsewhere.