Molecular Tools and Techniques for Detection and Diagnosis of Plant Pathogens

Abstract

Plant pathogens infect a wide range of plant species and cause great yield and quality loss of agricultural crops. Detection and accurate identification of harmful plant pathogens is very essential to improve the strategies for controlling plant diseases. The early detection and identification of plant pathogens provides the basis for understanding their biology and appropriate strategies to control that particular pathogen. For the identification of plant pathogen, traditional procedures, i.e., isolation, in vitro culturing and microscopy of the extracellular pathogens, are in common routine. However, traditional methods may take days or weeks for particular pathogens to produce diagnostic spores. Indexing for many intracellular pathogens is also very complex because they are obligate biotrophs in nature. The development in the recent tools in molecular biology has enhanced and accelerated the detection and diagnostics through the automatic purification of nucleic acids and specific proteins from pathogens.