Publication Type
Journal Article
Publication Date (Issue Year)
2023
Journal Name
Frontiers in Microbiology
Abstract
The potato crop is prone to infection by an estimated 50 different categories of pests and diseases whose causal agents are either viruses, bacteria, nematodes, insects, or fungi (Hussain and Singh, 2016; Jansson and Raman, 2019; Mangal et al., 2022; Munyaneza and Bizimungu, 2022). These pathogenic organisms are either soil or air-borne and usually inflict harm on all plant parts. The most commonly encountered diseases that affect potato growth and development include common scab, dry rot, black scurf, late blight, stem canker, premature deaths, and a wide array of nematodes. Soil-based infections that affect the quality of tubers include pink rot, common scab, leak, black scurf, powdery scab, black dot, Fusarium dry rot, and root knot nematode (Fiers et al., 2012; Hussain et al., 2021; Kowalska, 2021; Póss et al., 2021; Tegg and Wilson, 2022). However, it should be noted that Rhizoctonia solani, Alterneria solani, Phytophthora infestans, Verticillium wilt, and Streptomyces scabies rank highly among the most predominant re-emerging pathogens within the potato sector on a global scale (Muhammad et al., 2013; Abdurahman et al., 2019). Screening and detection of the aforementioned pathogens is deemed important for the planning of timely mitigation measures against these diseases, as well as predicting future outbreaks, especially within the asymptomatic zones (Hussain et al., 2017). Therefore, it is essential to develop effective, sensitive and credible diagnostic techniques that can detect resistant strains prior to the early onset of diseases (Islam et al., 2017; Kumar et al., 2019). Detection methods can utilize pathogen molecular markers, which additionally allows the distinction of strains within a given species, allowing farmers to adopt and embrace the most robust mitigation strategies before the emergence of disease symptoms. What’s more, these same markers can be utilized for pre-plant seed health testing in order to guarantee that seed movement occurring across borders is only for the disease-free materials, which also limits the need for quarantine periods.
Keywords
disease surveillance, point-of-care diagnostics, isothermal amplification, high-throughput sequencing, biosensors, bio-imaging, bioinformatics, pathogenicity
Rsif Scholar Name
Grace Wanjiku Gachara
Thematic Area
Food security and Agribusiness
Africa Host University (AHU)
Sokoine University of Agriculture (SUA), Tanzania
Funding Statement
This research was financially supported by all institutes of authors.
Recommended Citation
Gachara, G. W., Lahlali, R., Özer, G., & Touseef, H. (2023). Editorial: Perspective challenges for applied research in potato pathogens: From molecular biology to bioinformatics. Frontiers in Microbiology, 14 https://doi.org/10.3389/fmicb.2023.1140107