Digitalization of clubroot disease index, a long overdue task

Abstract

Clubroot is a devastating disease caused by the protist Plasmodiophora brassicae Woronin. After root hair colonization, the clubroot pathogen induces clubs that block water uptake, leading to dehydration and death. The study of the severity of plant diseases is very important. It allows us to characterize the level of resistance of plant germplasm and to classify the virulence of pathogen strains or isolates. Lately, the use of learning machines and automatization has expanded to plant pathology. Fast, reliable and unbiased methods are always necessary, and with clubroot disease indexing this is not different. From this perspective, we discuss why this is the case and how we could achieve this long overdue task for clubroot disease.