Super Villains

Wouldn’t it be great to have super powers? Like superheroes or super villains do. You know…so you can survive anything. What about this…let’s say…in times where you have no food, you can make your digestion system change so that your body could utilize the things that are available? So, maybe, when all there is, is grass to eat, you could change your digestive system to digest grass like a cow. Or…Or what if during a violent storm you could sit down, and force your skin to produce a gooey substance around your body that would protect you from the weather. What about changing into a spore when there’s no food or water…that would be cool.

Plant Disease Super Villains?

Tiny organisms that can cause diseases in plants are not super villains, but some of them have the characteristics described above. Most bacteria can alter their digestion system in order to utilize the food or carbon source that is available. It takes a little time (lag phase of growth), but once the bacteria adjusts, it will grow normally on the new carbon source. Many bacteria attach to surfaces and exude certain materials that make it more difficult to kill them, and fungi can just shut everything down and turn into a spore, only to wake up again when the conditions are friendlier. And viruses can be the most difficult to kill, because they exist as floating pieces of DNA surrounded by a protein coat, not really alive until they find a host and start reproducing. The worst thing about all of this is that some of these super villain organisms can live on the seed and may cause plant diseases if they are not killed before planting, so they must be eliminated.

You Can’t Live Here Any More

Seed companies routinely disinfect and test seed to make sure there are no disease causing microorganisms on the seed they sell. Most companies routinely soak their most valuable seed in diluted chlorine bleach (the kind used to wash clothes), or diluted chlorine most commonly used to chlorinate your swimming pool. This process kills all surface bacteria and fungi on the seed. Some companies use a diluted acid soak, or sometimes high heat treatments will kill bacteria that different soaks will not. Virus’s are more difficult to kill, and seeds are often destroyed if any disease causing virus is detected on the seed, but there are a couple of ways to destroy a virus located on a seed. One is to soak the seed for several hours in a cleaning agent commonly found in hardware stores, or sometimes seed companies will basically bake the seed at very high and dry temperatures in order to destroy any virus on seed. As you can imagine, these treatments must be done with care and caution, following a specific protocol that enables seed companies to kill the bacteria, fungi, or virus without killing the seed.

That’s it for now. See you next time, when we talk about “Seed Priming – How Companies do it”.
Talk to you soon