Approaches to training practitioners in the art and science of plant disease diagnosis

Allowing plant pathology students to tackle fictitious or real crop problems during the course of their formal training not only teaches them the diagnostic process, but also provides for a better understanding of disease etiology. Such a problem-solving approach can also engage, motivate, and enthuse students about plant pathologgy in general. This paper presents examples of three problem-based approaches to diagnostic training utilizing freely available software. The first provides an adventure-game simulation where Students are asked to provide a diagnosis and recommendation after exploring a hypothetical scenario or case. Guidance is given oil how to create these scenarios. The second approach involves students creating their own scenarios. The third uses a diagnostic template combined with reporting software to both guide and capture students' results and reflections during a real diagnostic assignment.

Molecular breeding for rainfed lowland rice in the Mekong Region

In the past 20 years, the rice-breeding program in Thailand had little success in developing new cultivars to replace Kao Dawk Mali 105 (KDML105) and Kao Khor 6 (RD6). Main reason is a poor adoption of new cultivars by farmers due to poor adaptation of new cultivars to the rainfed environments, susceptibility to diseases and insect pests and unacceptable grain qualities. The conventional breeding program also takes at least 15 years for releasing new cultivars. New breeding strategy can be established to shorten period for cultivar improvement by using marker-assisted selection (MAS), rapid generations advance (RGA), early generation testing in multi-locations for grain yield and qualities. Four generation of MAS backcross breeding were conducted to transfer gene and QTL for bacterial blight resistance (BLB), submergence tolerance (SUB), brown planthopper resistance (BPH) and blast resistance (BL) into KDML105. Selected backcross lines, introgressed with target gene/QTL, were tolerant to SUB and resistant to BLB, BPH and BL. The agronomic performance and grain quality of these lines were as good as or better than KDML105.