Mobile And Real time Plant disEase (MARPLE) diagnostics is a portable, near real-time, genotyping approach for typing individual strains of the wheat rust pathogens that have threatened wheat production since the dawn of agriculture. This method utilises amplicon re-sequencing on the portable MinION sequencer to type individual strains of the wheat yellow rust (Puccinia striiformis f. sp. tritici; Pst) and wheat stem rust (Puccinia graminis f. sp. tritici; Pgt) pathogens. The system is designed to amplify genes that are highly variable between strains of the Pst or Pgt pathogens and following amplicon re-sequencing, the sequences of these genes can be used for phylogenetic analysis, comparing “new” samples to a set of reference isolates from around the world.

To learn more about this simple system and how to implement this method in your laboratory do visit our website: https://marple-diagnostics.org