Low-Cost Spore Traps: An Efficient Tool to Manage Fusarium Head Blight through Improved Cropping Systems

Abstract

Fusarium head blight (FHB) is a devastating disease of wheat. Worldwide, Fusarium graminearum is the most dominant FHB-causing species. Its most common toxin, deoxynivalenol (DON), impairs food and feed safety and has an enormous economic impact. Agronomic factors such as crop rotation, soil management and host genotype strongly influence the occurrence of F. graminearum. Infected plant debris from previous crops, on which perithecia and ascospores develop, represent the main source for FHB, and hence, improved cropping systems aim to reduce this inoculum to decrease the infection risk. The best measure to evaluate the disease pressure is spore traps that detect deposited airborne ascospores. Commercial spore traps are expensive and require power sources, thus, they are not suitable for investigations in field experiments with different treatments. In consequence, we developed spore traps containing a Petri dish with Fusarium-selective agar, protected by aluminum dishes and attached on a wooden board. We compared the data of our low-cost trap with those of a commercial high-throughput jet sampler and obtained equivalent results. In field experiments to compare cropping systems, we observed a high correlation between the DON content in wheat grains and the number of colonies from deposited spores. Our spore trap proved to be a highly valuable tool to not only study FHB epidemiology but also to identify innovative cropping systems with a lower risk for FHB and DON contamination.

Blowin’ in the Wind: Wind Dispersal Ability of Phytopathogenic Fusarium in a Wind Tunnel Experiment

“…The species F. equiseti and F. cerealis stood out in the studies along with the ascospores of F. graminearum. Moreover, ascospores of F. graminearum were used as controls because of their already known ability to be transported by wind [27]. The total number of 662 Fusarium cfu were counted in the 90 different runs and, thus, about seven Fusarium cfu per run is very low.…”

Wheat Fusarium Head Blight Automatic Non-Destructive Detection Based on Multi-Scale Imaging: A Technical Perspective

“…The average accuracy of this method reached 88%, while the inference time of the model was only 4.6 ms. Combining the lowcost spore traps proposed by [66] for wheat FHB, it can be affirmed that the practicalization of real-time dynamic detection of wheat FHB spores is ushering in new opportunities.…”