Every single plant, whether that be an economically important one or not, they're all host to a variety of different microorganisms that live in them and use them for their home and for nutrients. While some of these microorganisms have no impact on the plant health, some are detrimental to the plant.
Professor of Biology at Brandon University, Dr. Bryan Cassone, has recently been awarded the Research Manitoba Innovation Proof-of-Concept Grant for his pioneering project on soybean disease diagnostics, to determine that a soybean plant is infected with a particular pathogen earlier in the plant's growth cycle.
"What we need to do is to develop diagnostic approaches to be able to actually say, oh this, this plant is infected with this particular pathogen," explains Dr. Cassone. "Historically, we do this is through visual inspection of symptoms. You look at a plant, you see there's something weird looking about this plant. It might be infected with a detrimental microorganism, a pathogen. But what we found is it's super inaccurate," he adds.
Between 15 to 30% of the time this has been accurate for soybeans. In addition to this is the assumption is often that the plant is infected with one pathogen, when in fact it could be infected with multiple pathogens but one can't confirm that by just looking at is, says Dr. Cassone.
Soyabeans are one of the most economically significant crops in Manitoba, with 1.3 million acress seeded in 2024. However, conventional disease detection methods are often unreliable and impractrical for large-scale implementation.
Together with Dr. Baljeet Singh from Assiniboine College and Dr. Chris LeMoine from BU, Dr. Cassone is developing an innovative molecular=based tool for the rapid and accurate detection of root and stem diseases in our soybean crops.
"So, what we've been working on is simply to develop a diagnostic, a way of determining what detrimental microorganism is infecting the plant that's really quick, really accurate and really cheap," explains Cassone. "And then what we've been endeavoring to figure out how to do this before you can even see symptoms on the plant, right?"
"If you can figure out a plant's infected with a pathogen, you can make more informed management choices that you're able to say this is infected with this, so you can start treating it long before it becomes detrimental to the yield."
"And as well as the seed," he adds, "because a lot of these pathogens infect seeds and so that's something that if you plant an infected seed, it can become quite problematic. We want to use it for that as well."
Dr. Cassone invites area soybean producers to join them in this diagnostic study by allowing his team to visit field sites to extract samples of soybean plants in their various growing stages.