Biotechnological Tools for Disease Diagnostic

Plant diseases affect crop productivity and lead to economic deficits all around the world. A number of pathogens such as bacteria, viruses, and fungi infect plants that resulted in qualitative and quantitative losses in crop yield. An effective, precise, and rapid plant disease diagnostic system is required for the early detection of diseases to minimize damage caused and also to increase crop yield and ensure sustainability in the agriculture sector. Early diagnosis also aids in the development of an effective, informative management system to treat plant diseases before they progress. Conventionally, visual inspection was done to detect the plant diseases after the symptoms appeared, but DNA-based and serological methods have transformed diagnosis of plant diseases. Standard PCR-based methods as well as their variants, DNA or RNA probe-based hybridization, and next-generation sequencing-based molecular diagnostic approaches have proved to be excellent choices for phytopathogen detection. But these techniques are laborious, time-consuming, and costly and need well-equipped laboratories and trained personnel. Therefore, new tools for point-of-care diagnostics that are rapid, specific, sensitive, and cost-effective and that can be used directly in the field by low-specialized personnel using minimal equipment are in high demand. Methods like isothermal amplification, remote sensing, the analysis of volatile compounds, nanobiotechnology-based detection, biosensors, etc. can be used to develop point-of-care diagnostics for on-site preliminary screening of plant diseases.