与埃塞俄比亚农业研究所（Ethiopian Institute for Agricultural Research，EIAR）合作，我们开发了一个移动实验室系统，它被安置在一个独立的箱子中，不需要额外的基础设施或高水平的专业知识就可以操作。2018年9月，我们在埃塞俄比亚成功试运行了优化后的MARPLE系统。作为其稳健性和机动性的最终证明，我们还在一辆陆地巡洋舰的后备箱里直接在田野现场运行了这一系统，证明了无需连续供电或使用任何额外实验室设备操作的可行性。
Effective disease management depends on timely and accurate diagnosis to guide control measures. The capacity to distinguish between individuals in a pathogen population with specific properties such as fungicide resistance, toxin production and virulence profiles is often essential to inform disease management approaches. The genomics revolution has led to technologies that can rapidly produce high-resolution genotypic information to define individual variants of a pathogen species. However, their application to complex fungal pathogens has remained limited due to the frequent inability to culture these pathogens in the absence of their host and their large genome sizes.
Results
Here, we describe the development of Mobile And Real-time PLant disEase (MARPLE) diagnostics, a portable, genomics-based, point-of-care approach specifically tailored to identify individual strains of complex fungal plant pathogens. We used targeted sequencing to overcome limitations associated with the size of fungal genomes and their often obligately biotrophic nature. Focusing on the wheat yellow rust pathogen, Puccinia striiformis f.sp. tritici (Pst), we demonstrate that our approach can be used to rapidly define individual strains, assign strains to distinct genetic lineages that have been shown to correlate tightly with their virulence profiles and monitor genes of importance.
Conclusions
MARPLE diagnostics enables rapid identification of individual pathogen strains and has the potential to monitor those with specific properties such as fungicide resistance directly from field-collected infected plant tissue in situ. Generating results within 48 h of field sampling, this new strategy has far-reaching implications for tracking plant health threat
