Mobile Gene-Based Diagnostics for the Agricultural and Food Processing Industry.

Intensification of resource use and other global changes have resulted in emergence of a variety of new diseases and increasing virulence of existing diseases, like Salmonella. These pests and disease organisms are ever more efficiently spread by traffic in goods and people throughout the world, and pose major risks to agriculturally sensitive areas and human health. Exclusion of exotic diseases from US agriculture is of primary importance to the biosecurity of the nation, and management of established diseases is becoming ever more important to agricultural industries with low margins which are increasingly challenged to meet global needs for food with limited resources. The primary objective of this project is to demonstrate simple new technologies to enable rapid field detection of pathogens with user friendly data management and reporting to facilitate management of a wide variety of disease organisms of importance to agriculture. Partners in the research community have been selected to demonstrate these technologies for a variety of important pathogens including the citrus greening organism (the most destructive pathogen of citrus), Salmonella (a bacteria which causes the highest incidence of food-borne illness in the US and globally), and fungal pathogens which have severe economic impacts on fruit. The new technologies, which are based on isothermal gene-based detection, enable rapid, sensitive, and selective detection of important pathogens with simple, inexpensive hardware operated by personnel with limited diagnostic experience. These characteristics are increasingly important for safeguarding the biosecurity and competitiveness of agriculture in the US. These technologies are poised to capture significant market share in the food and agricultural diagnostics industry.