Recent advances in sugarcane disease management

Abstract

Encouraging results were obtained in the fields of systemic induced resistance in sugarcane using certain strains of fluorescent pseudomonads and abiotic elicitors. Efforts are to be taken to manipulate disease resistance in sugarcane using different biotic/synthetic inducers of resistance under field conditions. This approach would ensure better management of diseases in agronomically elite varieties even if they are susceptible. Increased sensitivity has generally made the assays for pathogens more reliable and frequently the increased sensitivity contributes in making the assays more rapid and economical for routine detection and identification. Gene cloning is beginning to revolutionize our understanding of the molecular basis of plant pathogen interactions. Studies conducted so far in this institute on molecular basis of disease resistance in sugarcane have indicated the involvement of specific determinants of red rot resistance operating at molecular level. Further studies need to be done to identify and characterize such antifungal genes involved in disease resistance. In sugarcane also biotechnological applications yielding positive results in the areas of genome characterization, mapping of specific traits, molecular variability of pathogens, marker aided selection for insect/disease resistance, transformation, precise detection of plant pathogens etc. Technologies for the efficient production of useful transgenic sugarcane lines should be improved to become an integral part of varietal development programmes. The manipulation of plant DNA is rapidly becoming the world’s third technological revolution, having effects comparable to those of the earlier industrial revolution and the present in the information technology. Although sugarcane may not be the first among the crop plants in the list of transgenics due to complexity of genome, the higher productivity and established processing of sugarcane will make it one of the leading transgenic crops of the future. The search for suitable resistance genes will be an on-going challenge and depend on the understanding of plant pathogen interactions. Many of the diagnostic techniques like tissue-blot, dot-blot and (RT)-PCR have been used in different countries to detect sugarcane diseases in the field as well as in quarantine stations. These efforts would lead to precisely developing disease maps for different regions in the country to contain the disease or introduced disease(s) during germplasm exchange.