ISPP Newsletter 42 (1) January 2012

News and announcements from all on any aspect of Plant Pathology are invited for the Newsletter. Contributions from the ISPP Executive, Council and Subject Matter Committees, Associated Societies and Supporting Organisations are requested.

 Editor: Brian J Deverall  (E-mail)

Members of Associated Societies of ISPP can receive e-mail notification of Newsletter updates by joining the ISPP mail list

In this issue:

• Digital Diagnostics: Revolutionising Plant Pest and Disease Diagnostics
• Flooding situation in Kasetsart University, Thailand (October-November 2011)
• Three New Journals Covering Aspects of Food Security
• Bill Gates meets Banana Developers in Australia
• Is it Feasible to use Mycoherbicides for the Control of Illicit Drug Crops?
• A LUCID Driven Tool for Diagnosing Citrus Diseases
• Detection of Multiple Verticillium Species in Soil – New Method
• Plant Biosecurity Cooperative Research Centre
• Conservation Agriculture: A Solution to Soil Degradation and Soil-Borne Diseases?
• Special Issue of Phytopathologia Mediterranea on Grapevine Trunk Diseases
• Integrated Pest Management for Apples and Pears
• The Australian Export Grains Innovation Centre
• Acknowledgements
• Coming events

A project supported by ACIAR and entitled “Plant biosecurity: Technological research and training for improved pest diagnostics in Thailand and Australia” was lead by Dr Gary Kong within the CRC for National Plant Biosecurity, Australia, in collaboration with the Department of Agriculture, Thailand, and several other organisations in Australia.

The outcome is a Remote Microscope Network (RMN) operating together with a Plant Biosecurity Toolbox and the Pest Diseases Image Library, which provides an approach for wide adoption throughout the world. The RMN together with the Toolbox and Library is a world-leader for providing timely and accessible information on outbreaks of exotic plant pests and diseases. The toolbox contains diagnostic information on emergency plant pests. Information ranges from basic biology to molecular and taxonomic methods, meeting the needs of industry, scientists and government. The network portal is linked to more than 30 camera microscopes and enables remote diagnostics of bio-security threats from sites throughout Australia. The remote microscope service can deal with an information request immediately, or direct it to a national expert, putting Australia at the fore-front of technology-based bio-security support. To bolster Australia’s pre-border surveillance activities for exotic pests, the Remote Microscope Network has microscopes set up in Thailand, Vietnam, Laos, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, East Timor, PNG and New Zealand. The Plant Biosecurity Toolbox, with its online library of information and images of exotic plant pests, complements the Remote Microscope Network, which helps users rapidly identify a plant pest.

The technology has been awarded a Queensland Premier's Award for Excellence in Public Service Delivery, which recognises excellence, best practice and improvements in public service delivery in that Australian state.

Over the years, many plant pathologists from around the world have visited colleagues at Kasetsart University, and at the Thailand Department of Agriculture (which is on the same campus), in Bangkok. Late in 2011, Kasetsart University suffered the worst flooding on record. Flooding of the Bangkok campus commenced on 31 October, by which time the northern part of Bangkok was already flooded, with the level of flood waters in some areas higher than 2 meters. The water started moving in to the University on the morning of 31 October, and by the afternoon, the water was 80-100 cm deep. The floodwaters kept rising until the whole area of the university was covered by flood waters. By that time, small cars could not be used, only large trucks were able to move, but even for them it was still difficult, so canoes and boats were used.

The research groups in these labs have lost many books and materials for research due to the quick rise of the water, and because of the collapse of shelving that stood in the water for too long. After the water receded, the labs were a terrible mess, foul smelling and overgrown with fungi on the damaged materials as well as on the walls and benches. Water levels began to recede on 23 November, almost one month after the flooding had started. As a consequence of the flooding, the University has had to postpone the start of the semester to 19 December 2011 (normally the semester commences on 14 November). As this article was in preparation, the University was busy with cleaning and renovating. It will take some time to be back to the green University that we all remember - so sad but this is nature.

The matter of food security throughout the world is important and serious, and this is being reflected by the imminent start of three new journals alongside the ISPP journal “Food Security: The Science, Sociology and Economics of Food Production and Access to Food” which is published by Springer.  “Food and Energy Security”, “Agriculture & Food Security” and “Global Food Security” are all likely to start publication in 2012.

“Food and Energy Security” was described in the ISPP Newsletter of December 2011 as a product of Wiley-Blackwell in association with the Association of Applied Biologists. It has a web-site, which awaits submissions. Open access for readers and publication charges for many authors are features.

“Agriculture & Food Security” has been developed as an open access journal by BioMed Central which is owned by Springer Science + Business Media. The journal has a web-site and is open for submissions. It will encompass topics in the fields of sustainable agriculture and food security and will have a broad scope (for example, including livestock and fisheries science) and an emphasis on molecular/genetic research. Articles published are accessible and of interest not only to researchers, but also to the wider community of farmers, policy makers and the general public. Open access publishing is not without costs, and therefore there will be processing charges for each article accepted for publication. Charges will often be waived for authors from low-income countries.

“Global Food Security” is a new journal which will be launched in 2012 by Elsevier. It will offer the option of making articles freely available to all but authors should study the web-site for charges that may be incurred.

On a visit and vacation in Australia, Bill Gates and his wife have travelled to many places of importance. One was to Cairns in the Queensland tropics where they met a Queensland University of Technology team under Professor Jim Dale who have been working on major biotechnological improvements in the banana crop with substantial support from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation's Grand Challenges in Global Health program. Jim and colleagues are addressing nutrient deficiencies in the staple crop and have produced bananas with raised levels of pro-vitamin A to overcome public health problems in sub-Saharan Africa, where Vitamin A deficiency and iron deficiency anaemia lead to mortality, blindness, impaired immune function and brain development. They have also created bananas with high resistance to the damaging race 1 of the Fusarium wilt pathogen. The technology is also being trialled at the National Agricultural Research Organisation of Uganda. Click here for a report on the meeting in The Courier Mail.

That was the overarching question posed to a National Academy of Sciences Committee on Mycoherbicides for Eradicating Illicit Drug Crops. The Congress directed the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) to commission a study of the scientific feasibility of developing mycoherbicides for use against illicit drug crops and ONDCP commissioned the Academy’s National Research Council for this study. On 29 November 2011, the report was presented to its sponsor in Washington, D.C.

The committee was chaired by Raghavan “Charu” Charudattan, Department of Plant Pathology, University of Florida.  Others on the committee included Joan Bennett, Rutgers University; Jerome Cura, The Woods Hole Group, Massachusetts; William Fry, Cornell University; Guy Kundsen, University of Idaho; John Leslie, Kansas State University; Nu-May Ruby Reed, California Environmental Protection Agency; Judith Rhodes, University of Cincinnati; John Taylor, UC Berkeley; David TeBeest, University of Arkansas; Ariena van Bruggen, University of Florida; Maurizio Vurro, National Research Council, Italy; Alan Watson, McGill University, Canada; and Charles Woloshuk, Purdue University. The Academy staff assigned to the study were Susan Martel, Camilla Yandoc Ables and Janet Mulligan. Areas of expertise represented included plant pathology, medical mycology, fungal genetics and evolution, microbial ecology, toxicology, environmental risk analysis and weed science.

Mycoherbicides, which are developed from plant pathogenic fungi that infect specific host plants, have been proposed as a targeted means of preventing or reducing the cultivation of illicit drug crops of cannabis, coca, and opium poppy. The committee’s charge was to examine scientific issues associated with the feasibility of developing and implementing naturally occurring strains of fungi to control the illicit cultivation of the drug crops; ethical or political considerations were outside the committee’s purview.

Specifically, the committee was asked to examine questions about the efficacy of mycoherbicides, their persistence in the environment, the feasibility of their large-scale manufacture and delivery, the potential for mutation, the potential to have detrimental effects on non-target plants, animals, or humans, and the need for additional research and development. The following pathogens proposed as mycoherbicides were studied in detail: Fusarium oxysporum f. sp cannabis for cannabis, F. oxysporum f. sp. erythroxyli for coca and Crivellia papaveracea (formerly known as Pleospora papaveracea) and Brachycladium papaveris for opium poppy. The committee concluded that the research done on these pathogens was not adequate to draw conclusions about the feasibility of developing and using them to control illicit drug crops.

The committee found that the degrees of control that might be provided by the proposed mycoherbicides and the mechanisms by which they cause disease have not been established. It is likely that the mycoherbicide strains would persist at some level when introduced into the environment, but no data are available on whether they could persist at densities that provide continuous control. There are insufficient data to draw conclusions about whether the proposed mycoherbicides would pose a risk to non-target plants, other microorganisms, animals, or humans.

Therefore, additional research is needed to assess the efficacy and safety of the proposed mycoherbicide strains as well as to develop data for their registration as biopesticides.  As an initial step, the report recommends research to study several candidate strains of each fungus to identify the most efficacious under a broad array of environmental conditions. The resulting information would guide formulation development, the appropriate delivery methods, and the scale required to generate enough mycoherbicide products to achieve significant control.

However, conducting the research is not a guarantee that a feasible mycoherbicide product will result. Multiple regulatory requirements must also be met before a mycoherbicide could be deployed and additional regulations and agreements might also be needed before mycoherbicides can be used internationally. The committee also foresaw some key obstacles to the use of mycoherbicides including likely attempts by drug crop producers to mount counter-measures against the fungal pathogens, difficulties in application, and inability to assess the effectiveness of the mycoherbicides.

Another great identification LUCID driven tool, this time for diagnosing citrus diseases has been developed by USDA-APHIS-PPQ-CPHST and the University of Florida. The particular website is at http://www.idtools.org/id/citrus/diseases/. It is part of the wider access to recognitional resources described in the ISPP Newsletter for November 2011.

The Plant Biosecurity Cooperative Research Centre (CRC) based in the Australian Capital Territory has been successful in the recent competitive CRC funding round. The Centre will receive funding of $AUS 29.7 million, allowing it to continue for another six years from 1 July 2012. The CEO of the CRC, Dr Simon McKirdy, said growth in global trade, travel and tourism means Australia’s plant industries face ever-increasing biosecurity threats from devastating exotic plant pests. This additional funding will allow them to develop and deploy the knowledge and tools to help safeguard Australia’s $14 billion plant industries exports.

This is from Technical Innovation Brief 14 published by the SP-IPM Secretariat at www.spipm.cgiar.org, and contactable at SP-IPM@cgiar.org. It was authored by M Mezzalama, B Govaerts, K Sayre and N Verhulst, who are members of CIMMYT’s research team.

Conservation agriculture (CA) is a combination of reduced tillage, adequate retention of residues on the soil surface and crop rotation. The need to reduce tillage arose in the 1980s mainly to save manpower and energy, but also to offer long-term benefits, such as soil stability, reduced soil erosion, and more sustainable agriculture. However, soil-borne pathogens were a threat under reduced tillage. Residue retention was considered a modification that would substantially affect the populations of soil-borne pathogens. Increased soil moisture, lower soil temperature, changes in crop nutrient uptake patterns were recognized also to have a direct influence on pathogens. These physical and chemical soil modifications also favoured soil beneficial microflora and activated biological control mechanisms. Crop rotation played a major role in controlling soil-borne pathogens. There is a diverse range of these pathogens and of biological and physical characteristics among different soils, therefore it was necessary to investigate how to adapt CA principles and to find out the responses in each environment. At El Batán, in the subtropical highlands of central Mexico with highly degraded soils, CIMMYT established an experiment in 1991 to investigate the enduring effects on the performance of maize and wheat from conventional tillage (CT), zero tillage (ZT, no tillage, direct sowing with the multi-crop/multi-use implement developed at CIMMYT), maize and wheat crop rotations, crop residue retention (at the soil surface with ZT or chopped and incorporated with CT), and the removal of crop residues. The experiment also monitored those aspects that can make farmers unwilling to adopt CA, such as soil-borne pathogens. Improved soil management practices were expected to increase the income of farm household, while halting or even reversing chronic soil degradation processes associated with the current farmers’ practices.

After 12 years, despite the increase in root rot with ZT and residue retention, the lowest yield was obtained under CT mono-cropping with residue removal. Wheat showed a low level of root rots under all treatments. The best root conditions were observed under ZT, with residues retained. Interestingly and predictably, the rotation with maize increased root rot in wheat, as maize increases the population of Fusarium spp. Wheat in monoculture showed the lowest root rot incidence, confirming that wheat roots activate their own biological control through the production of exudates that favour specific beneficial micro-flora groups. Bipolaris sorokiniana, the cause of common root rot, was frequently isolated from wheat. Fusarium oxysporum was most frequently isolated from wheat roots in the treatments under ZT, retaining the residues, and where maize was rotated with wheat. It was the species most isolated over all treatments. No correlation between yields and root rot incidence was found, showing that other components influenced the CA system and the yield potential of wheat and maize under these conditions. ZT with residue retention and crop rotation resulted in a soil with good physical and chemical qualities, and high, stable maize and wheat yields, compared with CT and ZT without residues. Residue retention under ZT and CT induced greater microbial diversity, especially of higher total bacteria, fluorescent Pseudomonas spp. and Actinomycetes, both for maize and wheat cropping systems. Crop residue retention resulted in increased populations of beneficial microflora under both ZT and CT. The combination of ZT with residue retention was responsible for increased microflora. The favourable effects of these two components are due to increased soil aeration, cooler and wetter conditions, less fluctuations of temperature, moisture, and carbon content in surface soil. The increased microbial activity produced under these conditions would create an environment more antagonistic to pathogens due to competition effects.

Laura Mugnai has advised about a Supplement to volume 50 of Phytopathologia Mediterranea containing original and peer reviewed research papers, prepared from presentations at the 7th International Workshop on Grapevine Trunk Diseases (IWGTD). This Workshop was held in Santa Cruz, Chile, 17–21 January 2010, and was organized by the International Council on Grapevine Trunk Diseases (ICGTD). Publication of the Supplement has been financially assisted by the International Society for Plant Pathology (ISPP). The Supplementary Issue is dedicated to the memory of Dr Luigi Chiarappa, the founder and inspiration of the ICGTD.

Information of value is in a 2009 manual published by NSW, Australia, in conjunction with Apple and Pear Australia, Ltd. The title is “Integrated Pest Management for Australian Apples and Pears”. This is a pleasing volume offering broadly applicable IPM information plus an array of colour plates and a straight-forward text. The advice given can easily be transposed and remains largely relevant in many countries. After introductory material, the manual gives "Six steps to controlling diseases of apples and pears," and devotes a section to mating disruption. There are 28 illustrated fact sheets for specific pests and pathogens providing identification, the damage, prevention and management. A section gives information for reducing the impact of birds.