The primary purpose of this agreement is to develop scalable cryotherapy-based protocols to eliminate viruses and potentially viroids from berry crops and improve U.S. Clean plant production

Federal investment will support optimizing cryotherapy-based virus elimination protocols, helping produce more reliably pathogen-free plants, reduce disease spread, and strengthen the sustainability and competitiveness of U.S. Fruit production. This project will introduce infected plant material into tissue culture, prepare meristems or shoot tips using loading and vitrification solutions, expose tissues to liquid nitrogen, and recover plants on optimized regrowth media. Cryotherapy will be tested alone and, when needed, in combination with thermotherapy or chemotherapy to improve elimination of viruses or viroids . The resulting protocols will strengthen clean plant production by making pathogen removal more reliable, scalable, and broadly applicable across berry crops. This will be an improvement over current methods , which often fail to eliminate recalcitrant pathogens, and support state certification programs, nurseries, breeders, and growers.