Question

As a biotechnology student what control methods will you use to control witches Brooom disease of Lime in Oman?

Answer 1

Biotechnology has greatly helped the crop practices by both preventing/curing diseases and enhancing the plants' good traits. In this case we are talking about a disease that specifically attack certain species of Citrus. Biotechnological techniques can either preveent the disease by providing the plants with genes for resistance, or directly attack the pathogen with a specific antibiotic.

- Resistance development. For this we have to study the specific pathogenic mechanism of Candidatus phytoplasma. Understanding the mechanism we can start to study the characteristics of plants that may show greater resistance, we need to find the specific loci and alleles related to resistance, once found, we can incorporate such genes to the whole plant cultivations

- Antibiotic production. In this case wee need to study the metabolism of this bacteria, search for an specific pathway that we may disrupt to kill the organism. The antibiotic needs to be safe for the plants too.