Each summer, huge atmospheric plumes from African dust storms dump some 50 million metric tons of dust on the state of Florida before spreading through the eastern U.S. The plumes bring with them spores and microbes scoured from the agricultural lands of the Sahel. Many plant and animal pathogens have been found in the dust, but only sparse sampling is possible on land. So plant pathologist Andrew Schuerger is taking to the air. This summer, Schuerger and his colleagues are making the first high-altitude flights with DART, a detector that can be quickly strapped to the underside of a jet or airplane wing and flown into a dust plume as it approaches across the equator. Ultimately he envisions an early-warning system to reduce risks to people, animals and crops exposed to the dust.

For more information, see the CASW website.

How close is medicine to a world in which your treatment for hypertension, coronary artery disease or pain is fine-tuned to your genotype? Weaving a path through the thorny issues surrounding “personalized medicine,” Julie Johnson and her colleagues are now showing that a genotype-driven approach to drug dosing can work. An example is the blood thinner warfarin, where the therapeutic daily dose can be anywhere from 1 to 20 milligrams, and patients must have frequent blood tests to prevent dangerous bleeding and strokes. People of different ancestry vary broadly in how they metabolize these drugs, and new research has identified several genetic factors that explain much of the varying dose response. International trials are looking at the practical application of the findings and beginning to examine the big payoff: using genotype to predict the long-term outcome of a given treatment for a particular individual.

For more information, see the CASW website.

What will the strawberry field, grocery store, florist’s greenhouse and space station of the future have in common? In Kevin Folta’s vision, they’ll all have automatic lighting systems and reflective surfaces that use varying colors of light to fine-tune nutrition, flavor and many other attributes in plants. Since the dawn of photosynthesis, many aspects of the lives of plants have been managed by photoreceptor chemistry. Now that inexpensive LEDs are available in many wavebands, Folta’s lab has found ways to manipulate gene expression in growing and harvested plants to dynamically improve nutrition and flavor, control pests, time flowering and ripening and retard spoilage. These techniques have already found their way into fields in the form of colored mulches and reflective films. In the cut-flower industry, light may soon replace the chemicals applied to switch on flowering.

For more information, see the CASW website.