Artificial intelligence (AI) akin to that used in facial-recognition software is accelerating the grape-breeding process by accurately identifying those individual vines that carry favorable genetic characteristics, notably those that provide mildew resistance and higher fruit quality. The robotic camera system developed at Cornell University, called Blackbird, could also help select parent breeding stock resistant to other pathogens and, as a more immediate benefit for growers, could be used to determine optimum fungicide combinations for different geographic localities. The Cornell-led, U.S. Department of Agriculture-funded VitisGen2 project uses a high-tech genetic sequencing approach, known as the rhAmpSeq system, to sift through the part of the genome that is common to all grapes and find DNA markers -- bits of genetic code -- that are associated with genetic traits of special interest to breeders. Even with these advances, technicians still had to spend hours hunched over microscopes, manually scanning small circular leaf samples for signs of powdery and downy mildew infection. This entailed clearing away the chlorophyll from the leaf tissue, staining each leaf disk so the mildew's filamentous and otherwise-transparent hyphae would show up, and assessing the presence and extent of the infection, said USDA research plant pathologist Lance Cadle-Davidson, who was part of the USDA-Cornell University team that developed rhAmpSeq for use on grape leaves.

FINGER LAKES – A radical collaboration between a Cornell biologist and an engineer is supercharging efforts to protect grape crops. The technology they've developed, using robotics and artificial Intelligence (AI) to identify grape plants infected with a devastating fungus, will soon be available to researchers nationwide working on a wide array of plant and animal research. The biologist, Lance Cadle-Davidson, Ph.D. '03, an adjunct professor in the School of Integrative Plant Science (SIPS), is working to develop grape varieties that are more resistant to powdery mildew, but his lab's research was bottlenecked by the need to manually assess thousands of grape leaf samples for evidence of infection. Powdery mildew, a fungus that attacks many plants including wine and table grapes, leaves sickly white spores across leaves and fruit and costs grape growers worldwide billions of dollars annually in lost fruit and fungicide costs. Cadle-Davidson is also a research plant pathologist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Agricultural Research Service (USDA-ARS).