Purdue University - The Cruz Lab

09/08/2026

This week the Cruz Lab is hosting a delegation from Costa Rica's Instituto Nacional de Aprendizaje (INA) for a Precision Agriculture and Remote Sensing Training at Purdue University. Two days with the Cruz Lab: crop disease epidemiology and sensing, live demos of UAVs, ground robots, cameras, satellites and weather stations, sensor calibration, image analysis, and decision support. Crop diseases do not stop at borders. Tar spot moved north through the Americas before it reached Indiana, so stronger surveillance and diagnostics in Central America means earlier warning for growers here.
Thank you to Dr. Henry J. Quesada for organizing, and to Emanuel Santos, Andres Cruz, Alex Acosta and Fernando Cárdenas for leading the sessions at the main campus. The group then continues to Vincennes for field and food safety sessions, including a demonstration of John Deere AI-enabled tractor technology.

06/01/2026

Purdue researchers in the colleges of Agriculture, Engineering and Science are collaborating to advance AI applications.

05/07/2026

How do tar spot epidemics really develop in corn fields?
Tar spot often starts almost invisibly; sometimes with few stromata across an entire field, yet weeks later severity can increase explosively. Until now, we’ve lacked a field‑scale, mechanistic explanation for how that transition occurs.
In a short video, we summarize a multi‑year, field‑validated study (Lane et al., Plant Disease, First Look) that combines high‑resolution field data with canopy‑explicit epidemiological modeling to show how tar spot epidemics:
• Establish at ultra‑low severity,
• Spread vertically through the canopy (often not bottom‑up), and
• Transition into rapid exponential intensification.
The work challenges long‑standing assumptions about foliar disease progression and lays a foundation for precision disease surveillance and future integration with digital and AI‑enabled detection tools.
▶️ Watch the video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eAxM3bZ9TYg
📄 Lane et al., Plant Disease (First Look)
https://apsjournals.apsnet.org/.../10.../PDIS-07-25-1506-RE
Original image credit: Crop Protection Network See less

1 like. "Unraveling the Dynamics of Tar Spot Epidemics in Corn Fields"

12/04/2025

Purdue University researchers found that a subset of epidermal cells in plant leaves serves as early responders to chemical cues from bacterial pathogens and communicate this information to neighbors through a local traveling wave of calcium ions. The properties of this local wave differ from those....

11/11/2025

11/11/2025

A dry season can be devastating to harvests, putting both farmers' livelihoods and communities' food security at risk. Identifying the traits that make crops more drought-resistant is critical for developing hardier hybrids. Researchers at Purdue University's College of Agriculture are using cutting...

10/06/2025

Feeling very fortunate to have attended Barbara Valent’s retirement celebration at K-State. Beyond years of top-notch scientific collaboration, Barbara (and her partner in life and science, Forrest Chumley) have offered enduring generosity, support, and friendship. I was honored to share a few heartfelt words, and it was a joy to reconnect with scientific heroes, collaborators, and mentees from my time at K-State. I had an absolute blast!

06/13/2025

🌽 Huge thanks to Dr. César Falconí (ESPE, Ecuador) for his excellent talk at Purdue! Through a USDA NIFA funded project, we are working together to address corn tar spot, a threat to crops in the Midwest and the Americas. hashtag 🌎🌱

06/03/2025

Thrilled our paper on optical sensing & epidemio modelling is out in Phytopathology – First Look! 🌿📊

Huge thanks to all co-authors for 3.5 yrs of teamwork — and special shoutout to Alexey Mikaberidze & Nik Cunniffe for their inspiring leadership!
👉 https://doi.org/10.1094/PHYTO-11-24-0359-FI