The diseases are severely affected multibillion-dollar agriculture industry by plant pathogens including fungi, bacteria, and viruses. Many of the diseases in plants have similar signs and symptoms, making it difficult to diagnose the specific problem pathogen. Incorrect diagnosis leads to the delay of treatment and excessive use of pre and post-harvest chemicals. Proper identification of damage, defects, diseases, and disorders is the first step in solving the issue and producing quality crops. There are many methods for diagnosing pathogens on plants. Traditional methods include symptoms, morphology, and microscopy identification. These have been followed by nucleic acid detection and onsite detection techniques. Many of these methods allow for rapid diagnosis, some even within the field without much expertise. There are several methods that have great potentials, such as high-throughput sequencing and remote sensing. The utilization of these techniques for disease diagnosis allows for faster and accurate disease diagnosis and a reduction in damage and cost of control. Understanding each of these techniques can allow researchers to select which method is best suited for their pathogen of interest. 

The cultivation of oyster mushroom (Pleurotus spaidus) is considered as good environmental friendly approach for the bio-conservation of agricultural residues into food. Pleurotus spaidus is a good source of vitamins, amino acids, proteins and also contain less amount of fats cholesterol. P. spaidus is a heterotrophic organism and require a nutritious substrates for growth. In this study we evaluate the efficiency of maize residues (stalks, cobs, leaves) along with kikar tree (Vachellia nilotica) sawdust as substrate on the growth, yield and biological efficiency of P. spaidus. Five treatments were prepared in different proportions and data was recorded after spawn inoculation to harvesting of mushrooms using different parameters like; spawn running, pinhead’s formation, number of pinhead’s, development of fruiting bodies, yield and biological efficiency. Results of this study revealed that Treatment-T1 (sawdust 100%) significantly influenced with most of the growth parameters as compared with other treatments. Similarly, Treatment-T1 (sawdust 100%) produced maximum yield (444 g) and have maximum biological efficiency (88.8%), while Treatment-T5 (maize residues 100%) produced minimum yield (263 g) and have minimum biological efficiency (52.6%). It was concluded that kikar tree sawdust is considered as potential substrate for the commercial cultivation of oyster mushroom (P. spaidus).

Solanum tuberosum L. (Solanaceae) known as potatoes is a globally important crop plant producing high yields of nutritionally valuable food in the form of tubers.Rhizoctonia solani AG3-PT, teleomorph Thanatephorus cucumeris, is a polyphagous necrotrophic plant pathogen of the Basidiomycete order is an important fungal pathogen of potato (Solanum tuberosum L.) world-wide. Host resistant sources are the most recommenced, durable and environmentally friendly method for managing disease. Three resistant and three susceptible potato genotypes out of 92 potato genotypes screened for resistance against R. solani AG3-PT under field conditions were subjected to bio-genetic assays using PR-5, Glub2, pcht28, PR-1b, ERF4, PAL1, PIN2 and LOX1 genes and ef1α as a housekeeping gene; and antioxidant enzymes including peroxidase (POX), superoxide dismutase (SOD), polyphenol oxidase (PPO), catalase (CAT) and phenylalanine ammonia-lyase (PAL1) analysis. Resistance and susceptibility of the selected potato genotypes were confirmed under greenhouse conditions. Biomass parameters in susceptible genotypes decreased significantly compared to resistant genotypes. Gene expression and enzyme activities increased in resistant potato genotypes inoculated with Rhizoctonia solani AG3-PT compared to susceptible and controls, non-inoculated genotypes. Changes in expression levels of genes increased the highest in pcht28 (8.41 fold), followed by PR-1b (6), ERF4 (5) and PR-5 (5). Antioxidant enzymes activities were increased the highest in SOD (10 fold), followed by PAL1 (4), PPO (3) and POX (3). Identification and production of potato cultivars resistant to R. solani will be possible based on changes in biomass, gene expression level and enzyme production rate.

Northern leaf blight (NLB) is one of the diseases responsible for significant yield loss in maize, but scouting wide areas for accurate diagnosis is time-consuming and difficult. Nowadays we applied new techniques like Artificial Intelligence for the detection of plant disease and specific as well as precise application of disease management. We show that the proposed method can reliably recognize northern leaf blight (NLB) lesions in images of maize plants collected in the field. This method employs a convolutional neural network (CNN) pipeline to solve the complexities of minimal data and the various variances that occur in images of field-grown plants. CNN's model was trained to classify NLB disease and healthy leaf. Experiments were carried out with the Efficient CNN model to classify the entire image as containing NLB and healthy leaf. Proposed lightweight CNN method achieved 96.7 per cent accuracy with minimum inference time as compared to state of the art methods. The fourth coming era has importance of AI enabled devices such as aerial or ground vehicles, will aid in automated high-throughput plant phenotyping, precision breeding for disease resistance and reduced use of fungicides through targeted application across a wide range of plant and disease categories.

Keyword : Northern Leaf Blight (NLB), Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), Plant Phenotyping, Maize, images and Artificial Intelligence

The research was carried out at Akwa Ibom State University Farm, Obio Akpa Campus to determine the effects of oil palm fruit processing effluent (POME) on selected soil properties . The treatments consisted of applications of the effluent on the slashed but unweeded plots over a period of 37weeks at the total rates of 0, 80, 160 and 240litres/plot in 3 replicates (equivalent to 0,400000,800000 and 120000L/Ha). The application was applied for the period of 2weeks and the experimental design was RCBD. The soil samples were collected from individual treatment plots at 3 month intervals to enable evaluations of changes in soil properties over time caused b the treatment, viz: bulk density, total porosity, organic matter, aggregate stability, field moisture capacity, permanent wilting point water available capacity and pH. A significant impact of POME   on soil properties was observed as treatment rates increased from o to 120000L/Ha. For almost all the soil parameters (organic matter, available, pH, Field capacity, PWP, AWC and bulk density) the effect of POME was more prominent on plots receiving 80 and 160 L of POME. The results indicated that POME increased soil acidity of plot receiving 80 liters of POME. Organic matter content of the soil increased significantly by 25% in plots receiving 160 L POME and 33.3% in plots with 240 L POME. Moisture content at FC among the treated plots were significantly (p<0.05) different.  Highly significant moisture at field capacity was recorded  in plots with 80 L POME (50.96%), followed by plot with 240 L (44.76%) and plots with 160 L POME (41.15%) was the least. Interestingly, 160 L of POME significantly decreased the field capacity moisture by 6%.  The magnitude of the aggregate size decreased with increase in POME and the trend was in order  of control (2.7%) < 240 L (4.7%)< 160 L (6.3%) < 80 L (7.3%).  The assessment of 1mm aggregate size, the results showed that plots with 80 L and 240 L POME were similar, but significantly higher than plots with 160 L and the control. Micro aggregates (0.5 and 0.25 mm) significantly dominated the stable aggregate to water at three months after application of POME. The 0.5 mm aggregates collapsed from 21.33% to 20% when 80 L of POME was applied. It further disaggregated to 18.33% with 160 L of POME and 19% with 240 L of POME. This showed that POME enhanced the disaggregation of micro aggregate in the soil should the POME treatment is allowed up to three months on the soil.