RIVERSIDE, Calif., Aug. 13 (UPI) -- A U.S. graduate student in entomology has made the dream of many scientists a reality in her own life by finding and naming a new bacterium.
University of California-Riverside student Allison Hansen discovered and named the bacterial pathogen that could be responsible for psyllid yellows -- a disease that infects and kills tomato and potato plants.
Hansen discovered the bacterium during research on the symbionts of the tomato psyllid. A symbiont is an organism that has an intimate relationship with another organism of a different species.
She named the pathogen "Candidatus Liberibacter psyllaurous." Liberibacter, she said, is the genus in which the bacterium is nested; psyllaurous means psyllid yellows in Latin.
"Allison has a special gift of looking at questions from new perspectives and recognizing relationships that others have either overlooked or missed all together," said Professor Timothy Paine, Hansen's adviser. "This ability has enabled her to make a couple of key breakthroughs as a graduate student that have stumped other scientists for decades."
Hansen's discovery is reported in a paper published in the online edition of the journal Applied and Environmental Microbiology.
