Blanco Lab

The Undergrad Research Conference is now live! Make sure to check out the excellent talk of our undergrad research assistant Benjamin Cohen Stillman. Register here!: https://docs.google.com//1FAIpQLSewkh3jpA-hXP_0Ch/viewform UC Davis Undergraduate Research Center - URC #ucdavis #URC2021 #UCDavisURC

Happy Picnic Day! Watch "Storage Wars: The Battle of Fruit Freshness" and learn how you can join the rebel alliance against food waste! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FVtJpHx7By0

Tune in tomorrow for the UC Davis Virtual Picnic Day and visit the Blanco Lab’s virtual exhibit Storage Wars: the Battle of Fruit Freshness to learn more about the fight against food waste! https://picnicday.ucdavis.edu #ucdavis #PicnicDay107 ... UC Davis Picnic Day College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, UC Davis Department of Plant Sciences, UC Davis

An article about our paper just came out

We’ve published an exciting new paper on tomato fruit susceptibility to pathogens. Learn about the Blanco Lab’s latest publication here! Infections of fruit by molds depend on fruit defenses, but also on features of the fruit that can actually increase their susceptibility. In tomato, the process of ripening leads to an increase in important susceptibility factors, particularly the enzyme pectate lyase, which helps to soften the fruit and make it edible for us, but also weake...ns the barriers to pathogens. As we show here, knocking out pectate lyase can reduce infections in ripe fruit by over 50%, demonstrating its huge impact as a susceptibility factor. We hope this research leads to further discovery of fruit susceptibility factors which can help us to reduce postharvest fruit rotting. https://academic.oup.com///doi/10.1093/jxb/eraa601/6104152