Microarray Technology for Detection of Plant Diseases

DNA microarrays are a powerful technology that has great implications in plant sciences, biomedical sciences, veterinary, and pharmacological research. It can deal with large numbers of samples for the detection of microbes, clinical diagnosis, gene expression analysis, host-pathogen interactions, food safety testing, and environmental monitoring. Detecting and quantifying the microbial populations in microbial ecology are difficult due to practical difficulties. Conventional procedures such as dilution plating and biochemical assays are ineffective in identifying bacteria and yeasts at the species level and in identifying multiple species simultaneously. These techniques are also imprecise, time-consuming, and unable to identify unculturable species. This chapter focuses on the review of applications of DNA microarrays for identifying the plant pathogens, fungi, viruses, bacteria, mycoplasma-like organisms, and nematodes. In this chapter, we discuss the gene expression profiling of pathogens and their host plants, new virulent and resistance genes discovery, regulation of gene networks, and physiological pathways under biotic stresses. The supremacy of microarray technology has unraveled the unprecedented knowledge about plant pathogens and their interactions with the host plants, creating new research avenues in the field of molecular plant pathology.