– by Gillian Crowley –
One of the Peninsula’s best views is from East Saanich Road, looking out over the greenhouses at the federal Centre for Plant Health towards Mount Washington. The Centre, established in 1912, almost vanished in its centennial year when the federal government announced it planned to centralize its operations in Summerland. Community outcry and lobbying by local MP Elizabeth May helped persuade Agriculture Minister Gerry Ritz to reverse the decision. The Centre was saved – not to speak of the view.
Now, two years after that decision, the 40-hectare Centre continues its mandate to prevent the introduction and spread of plant virus diseases by acting as a research and quarantine facility. Importers without an existing import permit must have new grapevine or fruit tree species tested at the Centre to check for nasties such as Plum Pox virus or Grapevine Leafroll virus. The Centre also helps Canadian producers test their plants for diseases before export. (A key argument for keeping the Centre on Vancouver Island was to avoid the slight chance of a virus escaping and affecting the multimillion-dollar fruit and grape crops in the Okanagan.)
In the early days, the Centre and nearby Dominion Brook Park were part of the federal Dominion Experimental Farms program aimed at helping farmers improve their crops and agricultural methods. In the 1960s, for instance, local tomato growers worked with the Experimental Station to develop a high yielding hydroponics technology to overcome problems of depleted soil.1 In 1968 the Station was renamed and became the quarantine centre for plants, specifically grapevines and fruit trees. It is now the research laboratory for the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) as well. In an average year, more than 1500 samples of grapevines alone are tested. It’s serious business – an estimated $100 million has been invested in efforts to detect and eradicate the Plum Pox virus since it was first detected in Canada in 2000.
Testing is a lengthy process, taking up to three growing seasons before the Centre can confirm a new plant is disease-free. A joint collaboration between researchers at CFIA and Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada (AAFC) is looking at ways to shorten waiting times. One promising area is in “next generation” technologies, piggybacking on a federal program to add thousands of DNA barcodes to databases.
“NGS eliminates a lot of steps,” says Dr. Mike Rott. “Rather than testing for individual pathogens one at a time, nucleic acid – DNA or, in the case of most viruses, RNA – can be extracted from plant material, the soil, or organisms. Using bioinformatics tools, the NGS data can provide a genetic signature for everything that’s in there, including any viruses. From there we compare any viral RNA with our database to see if it’s harmless or something that could cause damage.” 2
Although it will take some time to build up the database of known viral genomes, this type of testing could eventually take years off the process. In the meantime, the field testing carried out at the Centre is still considered the gold standard for virus testing.3
1www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk2/tape17/PQDD_0003/MQ34482.pdf. The Social and Regulatory Relations of Metropolitan Victoria’s Commercial Greenhouse Industry 1900 to 1996 by Timothy Chan. UVic Masters thesis,
Dept. of Geography. P. 88.
2Quote from Government of Canada press release: http://grdi-irdg.collaboration.gc.ca/eng/about/success_stories/fruit.html
3Carol Masters, Centre acting director, says it will take at least 10 years to get the DNA testing model worked out and approved.
