Standardized Plant Disease Evaluations Will Enhance Resistance Gene Discovery
2010
Postman, Joseph | Volk, Gayle | Aldwinckle, Herb
Gene discovery and marker development using DNA-based tools require plant populations with well-documented phenotypes. If dissimilar phenotype evaluation methods or data scoring techniques are used with different crops, or at different laboratories for the same crops, then data mining for genetic marker correlations is challenging. For example, apples and pears may share many of the same disease resistance genes. Fire blight resistance evaluations for apples often use a scale of 1 to 5 and pear evaluations use a scale of 1 to 9. In some reports, a low number means low susceptibility and in other reports, a low number means low resistance. Other disease evaluations rate resistance as greater than or less than a well-documented standard cultivar. Environment, pathogen isolate, and whether disease ratings are the result of natural infection or artificial inoculation also have a strong impact on disease resistance ratings. Before a wider set of disease resistance phenotype data can be correlated with genetic data, rating scales must be standardized and the evaluation environment must be taken into account. Standardizing the recording of disease resistance data in plant phenotype databases will improve the ability to correlate these data with genomic data.
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