48 / SEEDWORLD.COM OCTOBER 2017 WHETHER YOUR BUSINESS is based in a large city or a small community like ours, it’s important to support the people and the business environment around you — and donating money isn’t the only way to support your community. As a business, you can benefit in many ways, ranging from increasing the awareness of your brand or company and its reputation, to improving staff morale and working together on local issues. This is known as corporate social responsibility; companies benefit while also benefiting those around them. To facilitate better support and engagement in our community, we’ve been opening our breakroom to a local collaborative group that includes busi- nesses, workforce development, K-12 and higher education and economic develop- ment, for monthly meetings. While these meetings are designed to discuss business issues around the county with the hopes of partnering on solutions, we find the conversations and connections once we leave to be of even more value. It also offers us the oppor- tunity to talk about what we do and our contribution to feeding a growing global population. Some of our accomplishments within the group have been introducing and implementing a robust physics program for sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders in five different rural school districts, securing grant money to provide supplies to engineering and robotics programs within the county, and hosting youth each year for manufacturing tours. Most recently, through our business group, we’ve been helping kids in local schools connect with internships in the Connecting with the Community and Training the Next Generation JOE PENTLICKI OLIVER MANUFACTURING VICE PRESIDENT/COO Joe.Pentlicki@olivermanufacturing.com • olivermanufacturing.com area and learn new skills. I can’t tell you how rewarding this has been on a number of fronts. First, it’s given me and others on our staff the opportunity to meet and engage with motivated high school students, who will be our new hires five and 10 years from now. We also learn from these connections about how they connect, what’s important to them and about their strengths. Then, through these internships, we and other businesses are able to show- case the business opportunities available right here in La Junta, Colo. They need to know they don’t have to go to a big city to find a job they would enjoy and great people to work with. I’ve found that supporting the com- munity is all about making the connec- tions, and in business, connections are invaluable. WHEN PLANTED IN a production environment, plants — no matter the species — must be able to fend against a number of stressors, including insects, pathogens and weeds. As a trained molecular virologist, my specialty is disease and pathogens, mainly viruses. As plant breeders work to introgress resistance genes into their elite lines, my staff and I put those genes to the test. The ability for plants to resist pathogens is becoming more and more important as plant breeders try to address the global nature of the seed business. At Eurofins BioDiagnostics, we’ve recently increased one of our services: disease resistance screening for cucur- bits, leafy greens and solanaceous varie- ties. For example, there’s a continuous effort to breed squash varieties that are more resistant to Cucumber mosaic virus (CMV) or lettuce to downy mildew. Now companies who might not have their own laboratories or the resources to conduct these tests can still verify if a plant is or is not resistant to a specific pathogen. Our program is set up to use our laboratory, greenhouse and staff to provide them with the data they need so that they do not have to make the same investment in those resources. As pathologists, we challenge inbred lines or varieties by exposing them to different pathogens, including fungi, bac- teria, viruses and nematodes. Then we provide the data generated to the breed- ers to help them make better selection decisions within their breeding programs. How It Works We typically ask the seed company for 18 seeds per line, and we’ll evaluate three repetitions of six plants. We plant Why Test for Disease Resistance? RAQUEL SALATI EUROFINS BIODIAGNOSTICS PLANT HEALTH SERVICES MANAGER RaquelSalati@eurofinsUS.com • eurofinsus.com/biodiagnostics the lines and begin inoculations at the cotyledon stage (before true leaf) and at true leaf. The plants are then allowed to grow in our greenhouse for two to three weeks, depending on the species. After that, we visually evaluate the plants on a disease scale and record resistance levels. We’ll do a weighted average for the three replications. The accumulated data is tabulated and sent to the breeder to be used to advance their program. Disease resistance screening is also helpful in verifying markers for marker- assisted selection. Even though a marker might push very high numbers, or be tightly linked to a disease resistance gene, it’s always good to confirm with disease resistance screening to make sure the marker performs as expected. For more on this, you can read seed- world.com/success-molecular-markers- hinges-precise-phenotyping/.