Follow that Spore! Airborne Inoculum Detection as a Decision Aid

Abstract

Plant disease management requires early intervention, which has traditionally required extensive scouting and surveillance to guide decision-making. Visual inspection, unfortunately, requires conditions for disease symptom expression and expertise in identifying causal organisms and may delay management strategies that prevent losses associated with a given plant pathogen. Advances in spore trap technology and molecular diagnostic technologies provide opportunities for greater confidence in pathogen detection and implementation by scientists, farmers, and regulatory agencies. [Figure: see text] Copyright © 2024 The Author(s). This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY 4.0 International license.

Keywords

• inoculum detection
• molecular diagnostics
• spore trap