Source: NCSU, 5/17/21


Plant diseases don’t stop at a nation’s borders and miles of oceans don’t prevent their spread, either. That’s why plant disease surveillance, improved plant disease detection systems and predictive plant disease modeling – integrated at the global scale – are necessary to mitigate future plant disease outbreaks and protect the global food supply, according to a team of researchers in a new commentary published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The idea is to “detect these plant disease outbreak sources early and stop the spread before it becomes a pandemic,” says Jean Ristaino, William Neal Reynolds Distinguished Professor of Plant Pathology at North Carolina State University and the paper’s corresponding author. Once an epidemic occurs it is difficult to control, Ristaino said, likening the effort to the one undertaken to stop the spread of COVID-19.

While some diseases are already under some sort of global surveillance – Ristaino mentioned wheat rust and late blight, an important pathogen that affects potatoes and caused the Irish famine – other crop diseases are not routinely monitored.

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