Frances Meehan Latterell

Frances Meehan Latterell
A white woman wearing a tweedy jumper-dress and a white turtleneck; she is holding a small potted plant in one hand, and holding one of its leaves with the other hand
Frances Meehan Latterell, from a 1967 publication of the United States Army
BornDecember 21, 1920
Kansas City, Missouri
DiedNovember 5, 2008
OccupationPlant pathologist
SpouseRichard Latterell

Frances Meehan Latterell (December 21, 1920 – November 5, 2008) was an American plant pathologist whose research in the late 1940s opened a major new area of inquiry into the physiological basis of plant disease. She was the senior author on a classic 1947 paper showing that the toxin victorin, produced by the pathogenic fungus Helminthosporium victoriae, caused symptoms of Victoria blight of oats, a new disease first described by Latterell and her major professor in 1946. This discovery of a host-specific toxin, as victorin was later named, gave scores of subsequent researchers new model systems for studying plant disease.