New Technologies for Sensitive and Specific Routine Detection of Plant Pathogenic Bacteria

In the last decade, nucleic acid sequence based amplification methods have been developed for many important plant pathogenic bacteria. Although they possess excellent properties with respect to sensitivity and specificity, the introduction of these techniques for routine detection has been hampered by in particular the lack of robustness. In different ring tests, both for human and plant pathogens, the failures of PCR amplification to diagnose correctly infected and non-infected sample material have been demonstrated many times. Carry-over contamination of amplicons has been recognized as the main source of false-positive results, whereas the presence of PCR inhibiting components in sample extracts is known as the main reason for false-negative results. In this paper new technologies and approaches are described to improve the quality of DNA and RNA amplification methods for routine detection.