Abstract
The timely detection and appropriate identification of causal agents associated with disease of crop plants or seeds are considered to be the most important issue in formulating the management strategies for plant diseases. This is particularly important for plant diseases of a bacterial nature, where disease-free planting materials is the only effective way to restrict the disease. The detection of bacterial pathogens still largely depends on cultural, morphological and biochemical properties. The protocol requires skilled taxonomical expertise and is also time and labor intensive. Moreover, it cannot discriminate between closely related strains of same bacterial pathogens. With the advent of polymerase chain reaction (PCR), nucleic acid based techniques have made the diagnostic procedures for plant pathogens, including bacteria, easier than the conventional approaches. The wide acceptability of nucleic acid based techniques is due to them being more sensitive, more accurate, more specific, and much faster than conventional techniques. The serology-based diagnoses are very often preferred over nucleo-based techniques as they are more user-friendly and less cumbersome, besides being sensitive, accurate, specific, and much faster than conventional techniques. This review critically analyzes the recent developments and scope of various nucleic acid- and serology-based techniques for the diagnosis of bacterial plant pathogens. Key words: Bacterial pathogens, diagnosis, detection.
Highlights
Bacterial pathogens cause substantial loss to the productivity of major crop plants
This review focuses on scope and status of different molecular diagnostics including nucleic acid and serology-based techniques for bacterial plant pathogens
The detection of pathogenic bacteria through conventional strategies involves the aseptic transfer of inoculum from an infected source to a suitable growth medium and subsequent transfer to selective or differential media
Summary
Bacterial pathogens cause substantial loss to the productivity of major crop plants. Unlike fungal pathogens, bacterial pathogens cannot be contained effectively through chemical methods. With the advent of PCR, DNA based techniques have rapidly become the gold standard for detection, and identification of plant pathogens, including bacteria (Jensen et al, 1993; Bereswill et al, 1994; Alexander et al, 2004). This is due to the fact that these techniques overcome many of the shortcomings due to their sensitivity, greater accuracy, specificity, and more rapid results than conventional techniques (Schaad et al, 2001). The AFLP method was more efficient for assessing intrapathovar diversity than RAPD analysis and allowed clear delineation between intraspecific and interspecific genetic distances, suggesting that it could be an alternative to DNA pairing studies (Clerc et al, 1998)
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