Detection, spread and control of diseases in plants
Students need to understand that diseases caused by pathogens can affect plants as well as animals, and such diseases can result in devastating agricultural losses. They need to be able to explain how communicable diseases in plants are spread as well as the physical and chemical plant defence responses. Students must be able to describe the different ways plant diseases can be detected and identified , in the lad and in the field and how the spread of a disease may be reduced or prevented.
Students often fail to grasp the importance of plant disease, so it is important to deliver this topic area in context of plants as the primary producers within an ecosystem,and so any disease affecting plants will be seen throughout food chains and food webs. In teaching about the physical and chemical responses plants have to disease it can be useful to compare this to the more familiar defence mechanisms in humans. Misconceptions with this topic area can be similar to those seen within animal communicable diseases. For example, they do not appreciate that there are different types of pathogens, bacteria and viruses. With this topic area it is important that students have sufficient knowledge about plant external and internal structures to be able to understand the defence mechanisms, so it is worth spending some time on this first.
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Plant diseases
The activities in this resource relate to communicable plant diseases, the use of monoclonal antibody diagnostic tests (ELISA), and the use of genome sequencing in identifying plant pathogens. The activities are based around tasks carried out in the ‘real world’ by scientists.
Plant disease practical
This practical activity explores how the technique of re-infection (using infected material to infect healthy plant tissue) can help to identify the cause of a plant disease.
Plant disease diagnostics
This web link discusses plant disease in the context of agriculture and provides some figures on the devastating effects plant diseases can have. It then goes on to outline how advances in plant pathology, molecular biology and biotechnology have lead to the development of diagnostic kits to detect plant disease before it wipes out a whole field of crops.
This would be a useful article to reproduce and read through as a whole class activity. In this way any difficulties with the terminology used could be discussed as a class to ensure all students understand the ideas around detection of disease.
Questions relating to the article could then be written for independent study/homework activity.
BBC GCSE Bitesize: plant defences
This is a clear and concise web link about plant defences against microorganisms, which would be suitable for all students to read. The text makes reference to a number of plant specific diseases including: Dutch elm disease, tobacco mosaic virus, rice blast and potato blight.
Students could be tasked with reading through this information (and watching the short video on Irish famine/potato blight) for homework. They could be asked to research another plant disease and write a paragraph (no more than 10 lines) on this disease. Gardening websites such as: http://www.bbc.co.uk/gardening/advice/pests_and_diseases/ can be useful websites to use for this research.
Plant diseases: GCSE *suitable for home teaching*
Its always good if you can link the curriculum to real life contexts and careers. The activities in this resource relate to communicable plant diseases, the use of monoclonal antibody diagnostic tests (ELISA), and the use of genome sequencing in identifying plant pathogens, tackle food poisoning and food fraud. The activities are based around tasks carried out by scientists working for organisations such as Fera in York. The accompanying video features Adrian, a plant virologist, explaining how he carries out an ELISA test.
Ash Dieback facebook game
A great way to get students involved in research into Ash Dieback.
In December 2012, scientists from The Sainsbury Laboratory hired Sheffield-based gaming company Team Cooper to develop 'Fraxinus'. The game uses real genetic data from the fungus which causes Chalara ash dieback and from the common ash, Fraxinus excelsior.
It involves matching and rearranging patterns of coloured leaf shapes which represent nucleotides - the letters that make up a genome sequence. People are better at this than computers alone, because the human eye can recognise patterns that computers miss.
The Facebook game is part of a rapid response to ask dieback funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC), which includes understanding more about the disease, how it attacks ash trees, finding natural resistance and predicting and mitigating disease progression.
Fraxinus game: http://apps.facebook.com/fraxinusgame/
OpenAshDieback site: http://oadb.tsl.ac.uk/