Building an antibody-based pathogen specific plant disease monitoring device for agriculture pest management

Current plant disease forecasting models require collection of information on inoculum density or pathogen load. This information is typically collected using subjective assessments or laborious and slow spore trapping or pathogen culturing methods, which in turn limit the amount of data that can be collected and may delay results past the time that disease control decisions can be made. In this article, we have selected Sclerotinia sclerotiorum, the causal agent of stem rot of canola and many other economically important plant diseases, as our model target organism. We have shown that the conductivity of the nanoparticle-ascospore complexes is correlated with the number of spores. These signals could be easily processed electronically and converted to rapidly distributable results, e.g. to smart phones.