New Crop Disease Detection Technology
All crop producers in the Midsouth and beyond know that pathogens cause plant diseases that can devastate a crop–any crop. However, rare is the case that a producer knows that a disease infection is imminent. Thus, producers generally apply a crop protection chemical only after the presence of a disease is detected on crop plants in a field. That is because it is virtually impossible and certainly prohibitively expensive to apply pesticides in anticipation of disease outbreaks that may or may not occur.
An Aug. 2024 article titled “Revolutionary AirSeq Technology Promises Breakthrough in Global Food Security” describes a new technology that allows collection of airborne pathogens that cause diseases in crops. Summary points from that article follow.
• Click here for the journal article that contains a complete description of the research and its results.
• Air is the primary route for the spread of many damaging plant pathogens. Thus, pathogen monitoring is a key to efficient and early pathogen detection and disease prevention in crops.
• Pesticides generally have little impact on stopping disease infections in crops–i.e., they are generally applied after a disease is present.
• With the push to reduce pesticide use in agriculture, disease monitoring becomes increasingly important so that disease damage is minimized and unnecessary pesticide applications are avoided.
• Researchers at the Natural History Museum and the Earlham Institute in the UK, along with researchers from other European institutions, have developed a new way of detecting pathogens that cause diseases in plants so their potential impact can be anticipated and mitigated if necessary.
• The new technology is a device known as AirSeq that sucks in air to identify DNA fragments of disease-causing pathogens that are caught on a series of filters in the instrument.
• The airborne particles that are caught on the filters end up in a collection fluid, which is used for DNA extraction and sequencing to determine what is in the air.
• The airborne pathogen spores’ DNA can be matched to their closest strain using genetic markers.
• The knowledge of what fungal spores are present, their abundance in the air, and how their abundance may have fluctuated over time allows farmers to apply pesticides only when the risk of infection is highest.
• This technology can also detect new and unexpected strains of a disease pathogen, which will allow determination of how a particular pathogen may be evolving.
• The ultimate goal of the research is to produce a device that can constantly monitor the air for the presence of pathogens that are a threat to a particular crop that is being grown in a field.
This device, when fully developed, will allow the testing of air so that disease pathogens that affect soybeans can be monitored and managed as needed. Such new technology will most certainly contribute to overall pest management efficiency and a more judicious use of pesticides that should contribute to minimizing the development of resistant strains of disease pathogens.
Composed by Larry G. Heatherly, Aug. 2024, larryh91746@gmail.com