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REVIEW article

Front. Microbiol.
Sec. Microbe and Virus Interactions with Plants
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fmicb.2025.1516723
This article is part of the Research Topic Diagnostic Innovations for Microbial Pathogens in Edible Plants: Cutting-Edge Technologies for Enhanced Detection View all 3 articles

Portable Solutions for Plant Pathogen Diagnostics: Development, Usage, and Future Potential

Provisionally accepted
Anurag Yadav Anurag Yadav 1*Kusum Yadav Kusum Yadav 2
  • 1 Sardarkrushinagar Dantiwada Agricultural University, Palanpur, India
  • 2 University of Lucknow, Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh, India

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    The increasing prevalence of plant pathogens presents a critical challenge to global food security and agricultural sustainability. While accurate, traditional diagnostic methods are often time-consuming, resource-intensive, and unsuitable for real-time field applications. The emergence of portable diagnostic tools represents a paradigm shift in plant disease management, offering rapid, on-site detection of pathogens with high accuracy and minimal technical expertise. This review explores portable diagnostic technologies' development, deployment, and future potential, including handheld analyzers, smartphone-integrated systems, microfluidics, and lab-on-a-chip platforms. We examine the core technologies underlying these devices, such as biosensors, nucleic acid amplification techniques, and immunoassays, highlighting their applicability to detect bacterial, viral, and fungal pathogens in diverse agricultural settings. Furthermore, the integration of these devices with digital technologies, including the Internet of Things (IoT), artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning (ML), is transforming disease surveillance and management. While portable diagnostics have clear advantages in speed, cost-effectiveness, and user accessibility, challenges related to sensitivity, durability, and regulatory standards remain. Innovations in nanotechnology, multiplex detection platforms, and personalized agriculture promise to further enhance the efficacy of portable diagnostics. By providing a comprehensive overview of current technologies and exploring future directions, this review underscores the critical role of portable diagnostics in advancing precision agriculture and mitigating the impact of plant pathogens on global food production.

    Keywords: Portable diagnostics, Point-of-care testing, plant pathogens, Portable biosensors, Lab-on-a-Chip infrastructure, and trained personnel, creating practical bottlenecks in real-world, resourcelimited scenarios

    Received: 24 Oct 2024; Accepted: 14 Jan 2025.

    Copyright: © 2025 Yadav and Yadav. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Anurag Yadav, Sardarkrushinagar Dantiwada Agricultural University, Palanpur, India

    Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.