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For Dr Xiangling Fang, strawberries are a happy fruit.

She loves eating them, decorating cakes with them and giving presentations at international conferences about them - and her PhD thesis about keeping strawberry plants healthy so impressed the examiners that she didn't have a single correction to make even though she wrote it in English, which is not her first language.

Dr Fang has been at the School of Plant Biology for nearly five years, working with her supervisor, Winthrop Professor Martin Barbetti, and colleagues on a serious disease -Fusarium wilt - that affects strawberry plants and impacts on farmers and the economy.

Dr Fang is in WA with her husband, who has a PhD in control engineering. But with her parents, five sisters, four brothers-in-law and four nephews in her hometown in Zhengzhou in Henan Province, Dr Fang tries to go back to China as often as she can and has only missed one Chinese New Year since she has been here.

In China, strawberries are mainly grown in glasshouses around big cities like Beijing and at no less than $13 per half kilo, are a luxury that are often only bought as weekend treats. Some strawberry varieties are native to China, where 300 years ago horticulturalists began developing new types from a pink-petalled plant, with a very small fruit, from mountains in Northern China.

Today's big, juicy strawberries are one of the most economically important berry crops in the world, and a high value export crop for the Australian horticultural industry.

For the first time, Dr Fang and her team have identified mechanisms that strawberry plants use to combat a serious strawberry fungus Fusarium oxysporum .

The research identifies the molecular mechanisms in which strawberry varieties respond to a devastating soil-borne fungal infection known as Fusarium wilt which poses a serious threat worldwide to commercial production.

The Fusarium wilt fungus penetrates through the roots and causes severe damage, yield losses and death to strawberry plants. Up to two million strawberry plants annually die or are seriously damaged from this disease in WA alone.

The researchers' work, published recently in the Journal of Proteome Research , will pave the way for developing new strawberry cultivars with improved resistance to the fungus. Dr Fang was the lead author of the paper.

Their work will mean growers should be able to use fewer anti-fungal chemicals, with reduced input cost and improved outcome on human health and the environment.

The researchers' findings provide the first understanding of strawberry plant resistance at a molecular level so that more effective and sustainable disease management strategies can be adopted locally and nationally.

The co-authors of the study were Winthrop Professor Martin Barbetti, Assistant Professor Ricarda Jost and Associate Professor Patrick Finnegan, all from the School of Plant Biology and Institute of Agriculture.

These studies were jointly funded by the Australian Research Council, the Department of Agriculture and Food Western Australia, the Strawberry Growers Association of Western Australia, China Scholarship Council and UWA.

By Sally-Ann Jones