Tsune Kosuge
University of California, Davis
November 28, 1925 - March 13, 1988
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Scientific Discipline: Plant, Soil, and Microbial Sciences Membership Type:
Member
(elected 1988)
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Plant pathologist Tsune Kosuge expanded our understanding of the biochemical reactions that are characteristic of the interactions between pathogens and plant-hosts. He defined the causative role that the plant hormone, indole acetic acid (IAA), plays in olive-knot disease, an olive tree pathogen. Through meticulous work identifying and isolating the enzymes used by Pseudomonas savastanoi to synthesize IAA, he created one of the most detailed descriptions of the initiation and development of a plant pathogen due to a hormone imbalance.
Kosuge graduated from the University of Colorado in 1952 and went on to earn his M.S. from Washington State University in 1955. He received his PhD in comparative biochemistry from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1959 and began his long and active teaching at the University of California-Davis in 1962. Throughout his long career in plant pathology he was the program manager at the Plant Biological Stress Program, the chief scientist at the USDA Competitive Grants Office, and the editor of Phytopathology and Plant-Microbe Interactions.
