Illinois study: How a potential antibiotics ban could affect apple growers

University of Illinois College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences

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Apple blossoms infected with fire blight.

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Credit: Tianna DuPont, WSU Extension

URBANA, Ill. – Antibiotic resistance in human and animal health is on the forefront of public debate, but it’s a less well-known issue in plant agriculture. However, antibiotics are important tools in fruit production, and their efficacy hinges on avoiding resistance in disease-causing bacteria. 

The U.S. does not currently restrict antibiotics use in fruit orchards, but regulatory measures could occur in the future. A new study from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign examines how apple growers might respond to a potential ban on antibiotics and how those responses could affect management decisions and profitability.

“The majority of antibiotics in plant agriculture are used on fire blight in pear and apple orchards. Growers face a dilemma, because they must treat their trees to protect them, but they run the risk of overusing the pesticides, so the disease develops resistance,” said lead author Khashi Ghorbani, doctoral candidate in the Department of Agricultural and Consumer Economics, part of the College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences at Illinois.

Fire blight is a devastating bacterial disease that causes flowers, leaves, and fruit to wilt and die, and it can severely damage affected orchards. Treatment options are limited, but spraying blossoms with an antibiotic such as streptomycin can protect against the disease. Controlling for fire blight is a significant expense; for example, growers spent an average of $250 per acre on preventative sprays during a 2017-18 disease outbreak in Washington State, the country’s premier apple producing state.

“The U.S. already has numerous federal and state restrictions on other pesticides and fungicides, so a ban on streptomycin is quite possible,” said co-author Shadi Atallah, associate professor in ACE.

The researchers developed a dynamic model that evaluates growers’ management decisions regarding antibiotic use when there is uncertainty about whether a ban will be enforced.

Their modeling scenario assumed two types of growers, representing opposite ends of a spectrum. The researchers note that these are extreme positions, and most grower strategies would fall somewhere in the middle. 

At one end of the spectrum is the “business as usual” grower, who continues to apply antibiotics at the optimal levels based on a long time horizon, without planning for a future ban.

At the other end of the spectrum is the proactive grower, who would adjust their spraying schedule according to the looming ban. They would increase their antibiotic use to ensure maximum efficiency before the product is no longer available.

Ghorbani and Atallah find that the proactive grower is going to benefit from this strategy if the government does enforce the ban. However, if the ban does not happen, the business-as-usual grower will be better off.

“Imagine that 10 years from now you have adjusted your application according to a potential ban, but it does not materialize. You will be in a situation where you still have access to the pesticide, but the efficacy is not there anymore because you have depleted the resource,” Ghorbani said.

They also looked at whether the value of the crop influences the outcome, as antibiotic efficacy can be considered a non-renewable resource that derives its value from the crop it protects, rather than having intrinsic value.

Indeed, they find that growers of lower-value apple varieties such as Fuji and Gala are more vulnerable to regulatory uncertainty and suffer the most damage from it, while those who grow higher-value varieties such as Honeycrisp are less affected.

“We found that the negative impact for proactive growers diminished as the crop value increased. It underscores that crop choices can have a long-term impact on the economics of the farm, and that higher value crops can help mitigate the uncertainty that comes from policy shifts,” Ghorbani said.

The study presents a hypothetical scenario, but it’s not far from reality, Atallah noted.

“As U.S. administrations come and go, regulatory priorities change, and there is considerable uncertainty regarding policies towards herbicides and pesticides,” he said. “Our model is a planning tool that tells you what would happen under different circumstances.”

The study demonstrates to policymakers how uncertainty affects the decisions of farmers and what the economic and ecological consequences might be. The findings can also illustrate how growers of different apple varieties would need to be compensated for production losses considering their management decisions and possible incentives for their actions.

Ghorbani adds that the study also provides a broader perspective.  

“Bringing the issue to the surface will hopefully get people to think about how to ensure optimal antibiotic use for plant agriculture, in addition to human medicine or animal agriculture,” he said.  

The paper, “Strategic responses to ban enforcement uncertainty: Antibiotic application decisions in plant agriculture,” is published in the European Review of Agricultural Economics [DOI:10.1093/erae/jbaf068].

Research in the College of ACES is made possible in part by Hatch funding from USDA’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture. This study was also supported by USDA-NIFA under grant number 1023572.

"Shepherd's crook" is a symptom of fire blight.

Credit

Tianna DuPont, WSU Extension

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Journal

European Review of Agricultural Economics

DOI

10.1093/erae/jbaf068 

Article Title

Strategic responses to ban enforcement uncertainty: Antibiotic application decisions in plant agriculture

Article Publication Date

10-Jan-2026

 

ISSCR statement in response to new NIH policy on research using human fetal tissue 

International Society for Stem Cell Research

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The abrupt ending of NIH support for fetal tissue research will undermine the development of new therapies for diseases that affect American families. Research with human fetal tissue (HFT) and HFT-derived cell lines has been integral to biomedical progress for nearly a century and has long been supported on a bipartisan basis under many U.S. administrations. This research has contributed to fundamental advances in understanding human development, infertility, infectious diseases, and chronic and neurodegenerative conditions. HFT-derived cell lines have played a critical role in the development of vaccines that have saved millions of lives worldwide.

This research is also governed by a well-established ethical and legal framework that includes rigorous scientific review, robust informed consent, and prohibition of profit from tissue donation. While continued investment in alternative research models is important and should be encouraged, HFT remains a necessary tool for addressing certain research questions that cannot yet be adequately answered by organoids, tissue chips, and other emerging technologies.

The announcement of this immediate change to NIH policy without prior engagement with the scientific community and without advance notice for ongoing, peer-reviewed projects is highly disruptive. Engagement with researchers in advance of policy changes helps ensure that NIH’s decisions are grounded in the latest scientific evidence and that the agency is fully informed about which lines of research may be constrained or lost due to its changes in oversight. Immediate withdrawal of research support risks the loss of life-saving biomedical research and undermines responsible stewardship of public resources.

We urge reconsideration of this policy and call for NIH to engage constructively with the scientific community to support biomedical research that advances discovery and improves human health.

About ISSCR
Across more than 80 countries, the International Society for Stem Cell Research (@ISSCR) is the preeminent global, cross-disciplinary, science-based organization dedicated to advancing stem cell research and its translation to medicine.

 

Biologists and engineers follow goopy clues to plant-wilting bacteria

University of California - Davis

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Ralstonia bacteria cause rapid wilting and death in plants. The bacteria also make an unusually fluid "goopy" secretion. A collaboration between UC Davis plant scientists and engineers shows that this goop is a viscoelastic fluid and that its properties help the bacteria spread rapidly in a host plant. 

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Credit: Jael Mackendorf, UC Davis

Slippery, drippy goop makes Ralstonia bacteria devastating killers of plants, causing rapid wilting in tomato, potato and a wide range of other crops, according to new research. The work, published Jan. 22 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, comes from an unusual collaboration between plant pathologists and engineers at the University of California, Davis. 

Ralstonia solanacearum can lurk in damp soils for years before infecting a plant, spreading rapidly through the water-carrying vessels (xylem). Infected plants wilt and die within days. 

“My analogy is that they cause a heart attack for plants, because they clog up the vessels and cause plants to wilt and die,” said Tiffany Lowe-Power, associate professor of plant pathology in the UC Davis College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences. 

Like many bacteria, Ralstonia colonies can secrete a film or coat around themselves. Typically, these films help trap or conserve moisture. In the case of Ralstonia, this secreted film is unusually sloppy and can make them quite difficult to work with, Lowe-Power said. 

“Ralstonia are charismatically disgusting, there's this like, real grossness to them,” she said.

Ralstonia’s secreted film is made up of a long, sugar-like molecule called exo polysaccharide 1 (EPS-1). It has been known that EPS-1 is somehow tied to Ralstonia’s ability to kill plants. But how? 

“With the ways that microbiologists and geneticists go about answering questions, we are able to get somewhat close, but not really to the mechanism,” Lowe-Power said. “We need a physicist.” 

Hari Manikantan, associate professor in the UC Davis Department of Chemical Engineering, studies the mechanics and dynamics of complex multiphase fluids. 

“I love goop of all forms -- saliva, foams, lung surfactants, tears,” Manikantan said. 

Goopy fluids are both viscous and elastic in different degrees. Elasticity measures whether a material can snap back after being stretched. Viscosity measures how easily it flows. 

Silly putty, for example, is elastic over a short time scale. 

“You bounce it, it’s a perfectly solid object. If you keep it on a table, it slowly flows out over minutes to hours,” Manikantan said. “The question is what's the relevant time scale.”

A mutual love of goop

Manikantan and Lowe-Power discovered their mutual love of goop when they met during a new faculty training before the pandemic. Using equipment in Manikantan’s laboratory, they were able to make highly precise measurements of the viscoelastic properties of secretions collected from Ralstonia colonies by Matthew Cope-Arguello, a graduate student in Lowe-Power’s lab. 

They discovered that the goop from pathogenic Ralstonia flows easily under the kind of shear forces that would be found in the xylem vessels of plants. This allows the bacteria to spread rapidly throughout an infected plant. 

How common is this trait? Cope-Arguello developed a simple test. If you grow bacteria making a biofilm on a plate and hold the plate at an angle, does it drip? They looked at other Ralstonia strains, including those that don’t make EPS-1, and also asked colleagues around the country to test other bacteria that are evolutionary cousins of the Ralstonia wilt pathogens. 

“We were really able to show, both from the data that our collaborators collected as well as data that we mined through publicly available genomes, that this polysaccharide is unique to the plant pathogens,” Cope-Arguello said. 

For biologists, the research shows why EPS-1 makes these bacteria especially pathogenic. For engineers and soft matter physicists, it provides an experimental system to study. 

“Now we have this actual relevant change that's guided by genetics that my community can begin to mathematically model. So I'm very excited about how this feeds back into that soft matter physics world,” Manikantan said. 

Additional coauthors are: Jiayu Li, Nathali Aoun, Tabitha Cowell and Samantha Wong at UC Davis; Zachary Konkel and Jonathan Jacobs, The Ohio State University; Nicholas Wagner and Tuan Tran, University of South Alabama; A. Lin Han Chan and Kristen DeAngelis, University of Massachusetts, Amherst; Lan Thanh Chu and Loan Bui, University of Dayton, Ohio; Mariama Carter and Caitlyn Allen, University of Wisconsin-Madison; Lindsay Caverly, University of Michigan Medical School; Matthew Wargo, University of Vermont. 

The work was supported in part by grants from the Academic Senate at UC Davis, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the National Science Foundation. 

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Journal

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

DOI

10.1073/pnas.2512757123 

Method of Research

Experimental study

Subject of Research

Not applicable

Article Title

The EPS-I exopolysaccharide transforms Ralstonia wilt pathogen biofilms into viscoelastic fluids for rapid dissemination in planta

Article Publication Date

22-Jan-2026

 

Jumping giants: Fossils show giant prehistoric kangaroos could still hop

University of Bristol

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Reconstruction of Sthenurine Hopping.

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Credit: Megan Jones

Scientists studying the fossil remains of giant prehistoric kangaroos have found that even animals weighing more than 200kg may not have been too big to bounce, overturning long-held assumptions about the limits of hopping.

Today, the red kangaroo is the largest living hopping animal and weighs around 90kg. But during the Ice Age, some kangaroos grew more than twice the size of that - some reaching up to 250kg.

For years, researchers believed these giants must have abandoned hopping, as earlier studies suggested that hopping would become mechanically impossible above about 150kg. Those conclusions were largely based on simply scaling up modern kangaroos, which scientists from the University of Manchester, in collaboration with the University of Bristol and the University of Melbourne suspected might be misleading.

Now, by combining measurements from living kangaroos with direct evidence from fossil bones, the new study, published today in the Nature journal Scientific Reports finds that giant kangaroos may have been capable of hopping.

Lead researcher Megan Jones, Postgraduate Researcher at the University of Manchester, said: “Previous estimates were based on simply scaling up modern kangaroos, which may mean we miss crucial anatomical differences. Our findings show that these animals weren’t just larger versions of today’s kangaroos, they were built differently, in ways that helped them manage their enormous size.”

The team examined two potential limiting factors for hopping - the strength of the foot bones and the ability of the ankle to anchor the powerful tendons that drive a hop.

Their analysis show that the giant kangaroos had shorter, thicker foot bones capable of withstanding landing forces and their heel bones were broad enough to support much thicker ankle tendons than those of modern kangaroos.

However, these giants probably did not bounce across the landscape like today’s red kangaroos.

“Thicker tendons are safer, but they store less elastic energy,” explained Dr Katrina Jones, Royal Society Research Fellow at the University of Bristol.

 “This likely made giant kangaroos slower and less efficient hoppers, better suited to short bursts of movement rather than long-distance travel. But hopping does not have to be extremely energy efficient to be useful, these animals probably used their hopping ability to cross rough ground quickly or to escape danger.”

The fossil analysis also revealed a range of locomotion strategies among the extinct species. Some giant kangaroos may have mixed hopping with other forms of movement, including walking upright on two legs, or moving on all fours, suggesting that hopping was just one part of a broader “movement repertoire”.

But the diversity of prehistoric Australia extends beyond just movement.

Dr Robert Nudds, Senior Lecturer in Evolution, Infection and Genomics at the University of Manchester, said: “Our findings contribute to the notion that kangaroos had a broader ecological diversity in prehistoric Australia than we find today, with some large species grazers like modern kangaroos while others were browsers – an ecological niche not seen in today’s large kangaroos.” 

The findings provide the most comprehensive assessment to date of the mechanical feasibility of hopping in giant extinct kangaroos.

Sthenurine skeleton in the South Australian Museum.

Credit

Megan Jones

Heel bone of the largest giant kangaroo species, Procoptodon goliah.

Credit

Photos are by Megan Jones and the specimen is from UCMP, Berkeley (please credit both Megan and UCMP)

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Journal

Scientific Reports

DOI

10.1038/s41598-025-29939-7 

Subject of Research

Animals

Article Title

Biomechanical limits of hopping in the hindlimbs of giant extinct kangaroos

Article Publication Date

22-Jan-2026