Soil Pathogen Mapping
News Reporter It’s time for your Farm of the Future Report. I’m Tim Hammerich.
You’ve probably heard of soil maps and vegetation maps, but in the future could we actually see maps of the biology of the soil. Researchers in Australia have made strides of mapping soilborne pathogens using DNA sequencing. Dr McKay is the Leader of the Soil Biology and Molecular Diagnostics group at the South Australian Research and Development Institute.
McKay. “Essentially we re screening the roots using DNA technologies. We ve got some qPCR tests we can run fairly quickly and we ve got our next gen sequencing method that takes realistically two or three months to turn those results around. But we re optimizing that to pick up pathogens that we don t have qPCR tests for, and that s been really interesting. So what we ve essentially got now we ve sampled 850 paddocks over two years. We ve got a pretty large collection of samples. We ve only, just now comple