Diagnostic Tests and their Application in the Management of Soil- and Water-borne Oomycete Pathogen Species

Oomycete diseases cause significant losses across a broad range of crop and aquaculture commodities worldwide. These losses can be greatly reduced by disease management practices steered by accurate and early diagnoses of pathogen presence. Determinations of disease potential can help guide optimal crop rotation regimes, varietal selections, targeted control measures, harvest timings and crop post-harvest handling. Pathogen detection prior to infection can also reduce the incidence of disease epidemics. Classical methods for the isolation of oomycete pathogens are normally deployed only after disease symptom appearance. These processes are often-time consuming, relying on culturing the putative pathogen(s) and the availability of expert taxonomic skills for accurate identification; a situation that frequently results in either delayed application, or routine ‘blanket’ over-application of control measures. Increasing concerns about pesticides in the environment and the food chain, removal or restriction of their usage combined with rising costs have focussed interest in the development and improvement of disease management systems. To be effective, these require timely, accurate and preferably quantitatve diagnoses. A wide range of rapid diagnostic tools, from point of care immunodiagnostic kits to next generation nucleotide sequencing have potential application in oomycete disease management. Here we review currently-available as well as promising new technologies in the context of commercial agricultural production systems, considering the impacts of specific biotic and abiotic and other important factors such as speed and ease of access to information and cost effectivenes

Biomass Charcoal Co-Firing With Coal

Many biomass power plants operating today are small plants characterized by low efficiencies. The average biomass power plant is 20 MW with a biomass-to-electricity efficiency of about 20 percent. Small biomass power plants are also costly to build. Co-firing biomass with coal in existing large, low cost, base load pulverized coal (PC) power plants has been suggested as a cost-effective, near term opportunity for biomass power. However, co-firing of biomass in PC boilers requires addition of a separate biomass feed system. The proposed concept avoids a separate feed system by converting biomass to charcoal for co-firing with coal. Fuel supply reliability would be improved by producing and stockpiling charcoal at dedicated facilities located off the power plant site. With an energy density similar to coal, charcoal could be transported more economically than biomass. Overall costs for co-firing charcoal and coal would be lower than systems co-firing biomass. Investment in Clean Coal Technologies could also be leveraged for biomass energy use by co-firing charcoal with coal in Integrated Gasification Combined Cycle (IGCC) and Pressurized Fluid Bed Combustion (PFBC) power systems.</jats:p