A radical collaboration between a biologist and an engineer is supercharging efforts to protect grape crops. The technology they’ve developed, using robotics and 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.