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Citrus Growers May Soon Have a New Way to Fight Back Against A Deadly Enemy

By Stacy Kim

The Asian citrus psyllid fills its stomach by feeding on the leaves and stems of citrus trees.

The tiny brown insects infect the trees with bacteria that cause citrus greening, a disease that makes the fruits inedible. Natives to Asia, the citrus psyllids were first found in the United States in Florida in 1998.

Over the last 15 years, citrus greening, also known as Huanglongbing or HLB, has ripped through Florida’s storied citrus crop, and now has moved into California. But an experimental treatment holds promise for combating a disease that has proved resistant to attempts to halt its spread.

Citrus production in Florida, which has traditionally ranked first in the nation, dropped five percent from the 2018-2019 season, according to a 2020 report by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Last year, California surpassed Florida in citrus production, accounting for 54 percent of the nation’s total citrus crop, the report found.

But California citrus, too, has been infected with huanglongbing, which discolors the skin of affected fruit, turning it green. The Asian citrus psyllid was first detected in San Diego County in 2008, and has since spread to Imperial, Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino counties. Once infected, citrus trees can show symptoms that include yellow shoots, asymmetrical blotchy mottling on leaves and misshapen, bitter fruit.

Trees infected with the disease—caused by the bacteria Candidatus Liberibacter asiaticus—are cut down to prevent other trees from being infected. According to the USDA, Florida has gone from producing nearly 80 percent of the nation’s non-tangerine citrus fruit to less than 42 percent since the arrival of the disease.

Although farmers and scientists have tried insecticide applications and treatment with antibiotics as short-term fixes for citrus greening, none of these has been effective in controlling the disease.

Hailing Jin, a geneticist at the University of California, Riverside, said her research team has recently discovered a potential treatment that is easy to manufacture and costs very little to make.

“The acceleration of the infection is scary,” Jin said. “It happened later in California but is still affecting them almost to the same level. That’s why we have to figure out some strategies to control the disease.”

After a seven-year search, Jin said she found citrus varieties that were immune to the citrus disease and identified a peptide in them that suppressed the disease and gave trees immunity. In her experiment, Jin used the peptide from one of the citrus fruits that is resistant to the disease—the Australian finger lime—and found that even a very low level of the peptide can be more effective in killing bacteria than higher concentrations of antibiotics.

In 2019 Trump’s EPA made a controversial decision to allow citrus growers to use the antibiotics streptomycin and oxytetracycline on commercial citrus. Health authorities feared that use of the drugs could increase antibiotic resistance, reducing the effectiveness of the medications.

However, the antibiotics, Jin said, are far less effective than the peptide treatment in her experiments.

“We found that the peptide can kill the bacteria within 30 minutes while antibiotics needed five hours to kill the bacteria but failed to kill them completely,” Jin said.

Unlike antibiotics, Jin’s peptide has a low risk of toxicity in citrus and does not have a toxic effect even at a high concentration. The peptide has another unusual feature: It stays active even after 20 hours of exposure to a temperature of 140 degrees Fahrenheit, making it more reliable than antibiotics, which can be rendered less effective by sunlight.

Most important, when injected into infected trees, the peptide can promote the growth of citrus trees and reduce the concentration of the bacteria that causes huanglongbing.

To test whether the peptide could produce immunity to citrus greening, Jin’s research team also sprayed the peptide on uninfected, healthy citrus trees. Five days after the treatment, the trees were exposed to the psyllid insects. After 12 months of spraying with the peptide solution every two months, the trees showed more growth.

‘A Potential Breakthrough’

Nian Wang, a professor at the University of Florida Institute of Food and Agriculture Sciences who was not involved in the study, said Jin’s peptide is a “potential breakthrough for HLB control” that can reduce its symptoms and prevent new infections. He noted that “It is paramount to further investigate other mechanisms that are responsible for the tolerance/resistance of HLB-tolerant/resistant citrus genotypes.” The peptide will provide one useful tool, Wang added, but a more thorough and coordinated management approach is necessary to defeat HLB worldwide in the long run.

Despite the efficacy of the treatment, field trials of the new treatment, which could take two to three years to be fully implemented, have been stalled because of the COVID-19 pandemic, Jin said. In the meantime, the citrus industry and farmers continue to use antibiotics.

But agriculture experts said that more eco-friendly management strategies could be found. California, which has a lower infection rate than Florida, “has an excellent plan in place to monitor and remove diseased trees,” Wang said.

In California, once the greening disease is detected in citrus trees, growers are encouraged to call the free statewide pest hotline. An expert will come to the infected sites, cut down the trees and establish quarantines for the affected orchards “to prohibit the movement of all citrus nursery stock or plant material out of the affected area,” according to the state’s Citrus Pest & Disease Prevention Program.

Some scientists speculate that climate change might protect citrus in California’s Central Valley from Huanglongbing, if winters become too cold and summers too hot for the citrus psylids, according to the University of California, Davis website.

In the absence of an effective treatment for the disease, farmers can also choose to plant disease-tolerant varieties of citrus such as Valencia sweet oranges, Vernia oranges or Sugar Belle oranges. In a 2020 article published in the journal Phytopathology,  Wang proposed that comprehensive implementation of strategies like the removal of infected trees, insect control, and replacement with trees not infected with the disease could successfully control the infection, arguing that failure of those short-term strategies can be attributed to the “small-scale or incomprehensive implementation of the program.”

To investigate whether a comprehensive implementation of strategies could successfully control the disease, Wang tried implementing such an approach in the Gannan region of China. The result was surprising: “Overall HLB in Gannan decreased from 19.71 percent in 2014 to 3.86 percent in 2019,” Wang and his co-authors wrote.

A comprehensive approach, Wang said, can be important in keeping the population of disease-carrying insects as low as possible until something better is available. In the meantime, scientists are working towards coming up with a long-term solution, the only way that citrus orchards can fully recover and regain their vitality. “One method won’t be enough because it’s a serious problem. All the different methods must be created to control the disease,” said Jin, adding that her research team is working to develop citrus fruits that are tolerant to huanglongbing.

“It’s going to require the work of a lot of different groups — the government, the scientific community, and interested stakeholders,” Nathan Donely, a senior scientist at the Center for Biological Diversity, said. “It’s going to take some time to find a long-term solution, and in the meanwhile, we need to provide some of these growers relief.”

For his part, Wang said he is optimistic.

“Overall, I think the citrus industry will win the war against HLB,” he said.

Citrus greening has decimated Florida’s industry and the infection is spreading in California. But a novel treatment, still in the testing phase, may suppress the disease and give trees immunity.

Citrus Growers May Soon Have a New Way to Fight Back Against A Deadly Enemy – Inside Climate News

Faculty members and students at Baruch College are raising concerns about the dwindling number of black and Latino faculty members.

An oversight hearing chaired by New York City Council Member Inez Barron was held on Sept. 27, with the purpose of ending the long-fought battle and coming up with a solid initiative.

Barron lamented that the percentage of black hires of the CUNY colleges remains nearly flat despite the fact that CUNY schools are located in culturally diverse areas.

“Since 1997, the lack of black hires was a constant struggle,” Dr. Arthur Lewin, a professor at Baruch College, said. A document — the Master Plan — that promised to enrich the culture of CUNY schools has been changing every four years.

Interim Chancellor Vita C. Rabinowitz testified at the hearing, saying that the main focus of CUNY Central is to bring in more diversity and hire more underrepresented minorities.

However, the Quarterly Report on Faculty Diversity conducted by CUNY’s Office of Human Resources Management proves how empty those promises are.

According to the report, the percentage of black hires was only 2.5 percent and the percentage of Latino faculty was 5.9 percent.

“As a student who takes liberal arts and social science courses exclusively and who is a senior completing the last year of a bachelor’s degree, I can count on one hand, the number of ethnic minority professors that have instructed me,” said Liam Giordano, a senior who spoke about his experience.

“I find this incredibly disappointing and unrepresentative of our diverse city and its pool of qualified, educated individuals looking to teach for our school.”

“In the black and Latino Studies Department, it is currently down to just three [full-time] professors without hiring replacements for those that leave, which brings the slow, deliberate destruction of the Black and Latino Studies Department,” Lewin claimed.

According to Giordano’s research, “Of ten courses under the subject ‘Black Studies,’ six were the basic, introductory course into ‘Black Studies’ that fulfills a CUNY core requirement for undergraduate students, and there are no graduate-level courses pertained to black or Latino studies this semester.” A decrease in the number of courses in African-American Studies is unlikely to attract students interested in the field to Baruch College.

In addition, the administration had promised a Strategic Diversity Plan in 2013 in which it will have periodic meetings with black and Latino faculty to resolve the issue and promote diversity. Five years have passed since administration pledged to this. Still, faculty members are complaining of seeing no progress in this long-standing issue.

Throughout the hearing, Barron shed light on the failures of recruiting and supporting faculty diversity. Although no clear-cut initiative was proposed, the efforts to increase faculty diversity will continue, she said.

Robert Holden, a professor at New York City College of Technology, said in the hearing, “If the university is serious about hiring black faculty, there will be an improvement.”

Giordano, taking an active role for making changes, explained his future actions. He “intends on addressing this issue to the University Student Senate and will propose a taskforce to investigate the shortcomings of the promises made by CUNY regarding staff and curriculum diversity, and following that, leadership within the Senate can put forward a recommendation,” adding that we still need to do more research.
Giordano, representing more than 500,000 students at CUNY, is hoping for having a well-rounded education.

The core value of the administration taking actions lies in providing students with the best education that ultimately cultivates future CUNY leaders.

Although Rabinowitz admits that CUNY administration is working to recruit black and Latino faculty members, there have been no notable developments.

After 40 years of protesting and waiting, faculty members and students are standing up for change.

Giordano ended his speech with saying, “I recommend a more revamped hiring system that is more inclusive than ever before to offer our students the education they deserve.”

A wildly unconventional film recently lured moviegoers back to theaters. Searching, the feature debut for writer-director Aneesh Chaganty, is told entirely through a computer screen — FaceTime calls, news stories, old home videos and YouTube videos. In an interview with Screen Rant, Chaganty expressed that the filmmaking approach used in the film was afresh structure.

Chaganty said, “If we were to execute that, maybe it would feel like the first time this has ever been accomplished.”

The film centers around widower David Kim portrayed by John Cho. David realizes that his 16-year-old daughter, Margot, has gone missing. Thirty-seven hours after an investigation is opened, a panicked David decides to track her social media and even check her bank account, only to find the secrets she kept from him for a long time.

After being introduced to Margot’s secrets, David is completely overwhelmed and devastated — he tears up when he sees his teenage daughter grieving about the loss of her mom and creating her own world online to cope with her issue.

Each discovery leads to a different route for the investigation and eventually unravels the secrets that Margot has hidden away.

Finally, this thought-provoking movie throws a question at the audience: in the digital world, should people relearn how to communicate?

In Searching, failure to properly communicate leads to negative consequences. David repeatedly says in the film that he knows his daughter “better than anyone else.” However, when it turns out that he knows nothing about her, the film puts a spotlight on the importance of communicating with others in person.

David calls Margot’s piano instructor before calling the police, who tells him that his daughter stopped coming to her classes a few months ago.
He then reaches out to Margot’s friends, who tell him that they are not that close to Margot. Consequently, David gets to know his daughter without really speaking to her — an expression of how people living in the digital world have different online and offline personalities.

Another theme that echoes throughout the film is that it’s easier for people to rely on the internet for emotional fulfillment.

In an interview with CNET, Chaganty said, “This movie isn’t a indictment on technology. It’s just, in a weird way, showing that we live our lives on screens.”

Rather than confiding in her father, Margot resorts to sharing her problems with a stranger online — something that happens all too often in real life. People are mostly staring at their digital devices and lose their ties with loved ones, eventually forgetting how to build a true relationship without using their phones.

At the beginning of the film, David is not able to send Margot a text that says, “Your mother would be proud of you.” Toward the end of the film, after learning that he failed to know his daughter fully, he is able to send her the message.

Searching immediately grabs the attention of viewers by diving right into the disappearance of Margot and the investigation. On the surface level, the film might seem like a typical story about a missing child. Nonetheless, Searching, using a nontraditional approach in filmmaking, shows how modern technology has been affecting every single facet of people’s lives.
First and foremost, the story unfolds on the computer screen. A similar technique is used in the screen-based Unfriended series, shedding light on negative online culture. Otherwise, Searching is about how useful the internet can be for people who want to figure things out for themselves. David solves the case of his daughter’s disappearance using the internet alone.

Despite the fact that the movie lacks many other components that most thriller films have, Searching’s advantage lies in the fact that viewers can see action and reaction at the same time.

Cho’s face is framed in an extreme close-up, which makes it easy to see his unsettled feelings as he goes through his daughter’s laptop. Every scene in the film captures Cho’s face, which is filled with worry and distress.
Cho is the first Asian-American person to lead a Hollywood thriller, notable when paired with the film’s $6 million gross from its wide release opening weekend. Along with Crazy Rich Asians — which has an all-Asian cast — Searching proves that Asian-American representation can succeed in Hollywood.

While speaking to CNET, Cho mentioned, “This is an example of the end game which is to get to a place where the character is written on the page Asian, but it’s also not a point in the plot.”

For obvious reasons, such as great actors and storyline, Searching is a must-see, perfect summer movie. Deviating from the tradition of any thriller film, Searching does a great job in making a satisfying screen-based thriller.
Stacy Kim
September 13, 2018

In order to remove excess gas from oil drilling, shale drillers have been resorting to burning natural gas in wells, also known as “flaring.”
Natural gas — a byproduct of oil extraction — is less valuable than oil, hence the reason oil companies burn natural gas.

Venetta Seals, the mayor of Pecos, Texas, said, “Without the infrastructure being here, the only other solution is what, they stop drilling? That would certainly turn things upside down out here if that were to stop happening.”
To stop burning natural gas would require adding more pipelines or decreasing oil production, which would adversely impact the short-term profits of these oil companies.

Oil production is a lucrative business and a vital source of revenue to energy companies and local economies. Failing to see the big picture of wasting natural gas by flaring may bring forth unexpected consequences.
In some respects, Seals is operating rationally in the interest of her community; oil sells for $69 a barrel whereas natural gas is worth $3 per million British thermal units. Nonetheless, Seals’ projections may be shortsighted.

To understand why, it is important to ask two questions. The first is, how would people feel knowing that energy companies are adding greenhouse gases that impact global temperatures?

Furthermore, how would people living near a flaring zone cope with headaches, dizziness and loss of coordination caused by the release of methane?

Rather than striving for maximum profit margins, the government should start looking into the several long-term consequences flaring gas will have on the public’s health, well-being and the economy.

With more flaring, the environment has been deteriorating. Flaring emits greenhouse gases equivalent to 2 million cars, which exacerbates the effects of global warming.

Aaron Bernstein, a doctor at Boston Children’s Hospital, said that even a small global temperature increase could lead to troubling consequences, like rising sea levels, population displacement, disruption to the food supply, flooding and an increase of infectious diseases.

Rising sea levels, as salt water seeps in, contaminates the drinking water supply and adversely impacts human health.

The significance is that the government should look out for the health and well-being of its citizens in order to produce efficient workers and build a better community — this cannot be done without creating a healthy climate.

First of all, the problem is that the state government gives these companies permission to flare. Most oil production businesses resort to burning gas due to the fact that flaring is much more convenient than planning and manufacturing brand new natural gas pipelines.

The simplest way to limit flaring is to heavily tax companies that choose to do so because more companies will most likely decrease the amount of gas they burn. Another solution is to utilize this excess natural gas as an energy source.

Natural gas is used to generate electricity, fuel automobiles, heat water and bake food. It is also used frequently in the manufacturing process to produce glass, steel, cement and many other commodities.

Natural gas vehicles not only emit less pollutants — or greenhouse gases — but they also cost less than vehicles that run on gasoline. Despite the potentially devastating consequences of burning natural gases, there is still room for change.

Governments and individuals should recognize what will benefit them the most in the long run and cooperate to tear down the old tradition of flaring, which leads to nothing but ruin and devastation.

Stacy Kim
September 13, 2018