Recent Trends in Rapid Diagnosis of Plant Pathogens

Contents: Forward. Preface. Acknowledgements. Introduction. 1. Essentials of phytopathological laboratory. 2. Isolation, purification and preservation of microbial cultures. 3. Identification of some commonly-occurring plant pathogenic fungi. 4. Nematophagous fungi. 5. Mycotoxins - importance and their detection. 6. Isolation and inoculation of bacteria. 7. Detection of bacterial infection. 8. Characterization of phytopathogenic bacteria. 9. Cultural characteristics of bacteria. 10. Physiological characteristics of bacteria. 11. Serological identification of plant pathogenic bacteria. 12. PCR based diagnosis of bacterial diseases. 13. Transmission of viruses. 14. Production of polyclonal antiserum. 15. Immunological techniques for identification of viruses. 16. Nucleic acid hybridization techniques for detection of plant pathogens. 17. Tissue culture studies. 18. Genetic engineering - transgenic plants. 19. Nanotechnology for detection of plant pathogens. Annexures. Glossary. References.

"Plant diseases are caused by different groups of organisms belonging to fungi, bacteria, viruses, phytoplasmas etc. They cause drastic yield losses in agricultural crops and therefore, need to be identified in the early stages and thereby, management strategies can be adopted accordingly.

In this book, it is focused majorly on some of fundamental aspects like isolation and identification of different fungal genera with their morphological characters and microscopic features, methods of isolation of nematophagous fungi and various preservative methods.

Features:

Role of tissue culture in developing disease resistance plants and development of transgenics against viral and fungal diseases has been discussed.
As far as virology is concerned, different molecular techniques like PCR, AFLP, Multiplex PCR etc., for detection of multiple infections along with procedures are given.
Application of nanotechnology in niche areas of plant pathology are described briefly."