Plant Science 158 (2000) 185 – 186
Book review
www.elsevier.com/locate/plantsci
Sugarcane Pathology. Volume 1: Fungal Diseases, Edited by G.P. Rao, A. Bergamin Filho, R.C. Magarey and L.J.C. Autrey, Science Publishers, Inc., Enfield, NH, 1999, 308 pp. ISBN 1-57808-046-0; STG £56.00
Sugarcane is an important cash crop in many tropical and subtropical countries. This crop can be affected by numerous diseases that induce sig-nificant yield losses. Many advances have been made in sugarcane pathology during the last decade. Updated information has become avail-able regarding known diseases, new diseases have been described and identified, and thanks to pro-gress in molecular biology, new diagnostic tech-niques have been developed. Only a few books have been published on sugarcane pathology and the last comprehensive one was published in 1989. This new book, which is the first in a trilogy, is devoted to fungal diseases. According to the editors, the objective of this volume was not to give a comprehensive account of all the fungal disease problems, but rather a compara-tive idea of current research being carried out in this field worldwide.
The book begins with an interesting foreword by Brian Egan, one of the most famous sugar-cane pathologists, who gives his impressions about his 50 years in sugarcane pathology. The volume is then structured into four sections of unequal importance. Section I (‘Disease’) is devoted to reviews of fungal diseases but only three are described: Pachymetra root rot, dry top rot and common rust. Among those, only Pachymetra root rot can be considered a rela-tively new disease because the two others have been known for several decades. The reader might therefore be frustrated because this section is missing data on other important fungal dis-eases of major importance for which new infor-mation became available during the last decade.
Each of the chapters does, however, give a good and updated review.
Section II (‘Pathogen’) comprises four chapters on fungal pathogens. Immunological methods to detect the red rot and smut pathogens are de-scribed in the first two chapters. The following chapter is a kind of ‘odd ball’ because it de-scribes 20 new species of the genus Cercospora
isolated from weed flora of sugarcane. Each spe-cies is described (text and figures) by the symp-toms it causes and its taxonomic characteristics. Unfortunately, no information is available re-garding the pathogenicity of these new fungal species in sugarcane.
The last chapter of section II describes the biochemistry and physiopathology of the rust-sugarcane interaction.
Section III (‘Pathology’) assembles various in-formation on three diseases. The first chapter deals with molecular aspects (mating-type genes and diagnosis) of Ustilago scitaminea, the causal agent of smut. A biotechnological approach to study the pathogenesis of eyespot disease is given in the second chapter, and the third chapter de-scribes the effects of Colletotrichum falcatum on the morphology and yield attributes of sugarcane in Nigeria.
Section IV (‘Control’) is the largest section of the book with seven chapters on various aspects of disease control. The first chapter describes the differences in morphological characteristics of re-sistant and susceptible sugarcane clones (several very nice colour pictures of microscopic details or tissue sections are shown). Two chapters deal with phytopathometry (quantification of diseases) applied to the integrated management of the borer-rot complex in sugarcane. In particular, a new software (COMBRO®) to select and train
evaluators for estimation of the borer-rot com-plex severity is described. One chapter lists the fungal diseases in Thailand and gives the trends
Book re6iew
186
in sugarcane fungal disease control in this country. The last three chapters deal with the description or efficacy of new anti-fungal products: a herbal volatile fungitoxicant from Cinnamomum zey
-lanicum against C. falcatum; volatile plant prod-ucts (especially from Lippia alba) against
Ceratocystis paradoxa; and newly synthesised organophosphorus derivatives against various fungi. The volume finishes with a subject index and a biography of the editors.
Overall, this book looks like a gathering of various research results which were then split into different sections rather than an exhaustive review of specific fungal pathology subjects. As a result,
several important subjects or diseases were not included in the book. This volume will be of particular interest to advanced students and scien-tists with special interests in sugarcane pathology. However, it also contains information that might be useful to other plant pathologists.
Philippe Rott
CIRAD,
Programme Canne a` Sucre,
TA 71/09, A6enue Agropolis,
34398, Montpellier Cedex 5,
France
E-mail: philippe.rott@cirad.fr
