Stuck for holiday gift ideas? How about … a chocolate bar-sized wheat DNA sequencer!

As any planting producer can tell you, diagnosis of harvest disease is crucial. But traditional methods, the APS informs us, “rely on the expertise of pathologists, who in turn rely on the physical appearance of disease symptoms, which can be similar to damage caused by other factors, such as nutrient deficiencies or environmental elements.” Pathologists “in addition experience difficulty detecting coinfections and pathogens that do not infect aerial parts of the plant. Furthermore, there is no existing method for rapidly identifying unknown pathogens during an episode.” A wheat blast fungus outbreak in Bangladesh in 2016 is an example of where a handheld sequencer could someday prove far more vital than a typical Thanksgiving gimmick.

That flare-up spread across an estimated 15,000 hectares (16% of cultivated wheat area in the country) and resulted in yield shortfalls as high as 100%. The APS sets out that scientists based at the USDA-ARS and Kansas State University have developed the new technology to rapidly identify viruses in wheat fields with markedly higher accuracy.

They collected “four wheat samples from western Kansas and used a new harmonica-sized DNA sequencer and a computer program to quickly detect three different viruses in the samples. Furthermore, their results suggested that the samples contained a new virus strain.” They are now working on improving the technique so that it can be used in field applications, the APS observed.

Their work, described in “ Wheat Virus Identification Within Infected Tissue Using Nanopore Sequencing Technology​ ,” is the first report of using the new portable DNA sequencing technology for wheat virus identification. These results have broad applications to plant and animal disease identification and field diagnostics technology. Not a bad gift — early or late. ————- Any cutting edge agtech gifts spring to mind?