Applications of LAMP Based Diagnostic Kits in Crop Management

Human population is increasing at exponential growth in all parts of the world. Based on the recent report on food security released in 2010 [1]. Requirement of food will increase due to continuous increase in the human population leading to 70% more food requirement by 2050 [1]. Vegetarian population of the world is estimated to be 1.5 billion in 2010 [2]. Apart from the humans all the feedstock animals also rely on food produced by the plants. The demand of food is higher than the supply because of continuous decrease in the agricultural land. Under such circumstance, effective crop management is essential. The crop losses due to pathogenic infection was around 20-40% [3]. Rice, wheat, barley, maize and soybean are majorly consumed crop globally which was reduced by 12% due to plant diseases. Whereas the crop yield of groundnuts and potatoes were affected around 24% and of wheat and cotton around 50% and 80% [4]. Economic losses due to pathogens in US only was estimated to be 40 billion dollars so worldwide loses can be imagined [5,6]. With the evolution of science, researchers have found numerous techniques to identify pathogens but all of them require high initial cost, hi-tech infrastructure facility and experienced researchers. Therefore, these technologies are confined to the laboratories or research institutes located in cities. There is an urgent need to develop and popularize technologies that are suitable to the rural areas for speedy testing of pathogens to avoid epidemics and for launching crop protection measures to manage pathogens [7-29].