Sensors and biosensors for pathogen and pest detection in agricultural systems : recent trends and oportunities

Pathogen and pest-linked diseases across agriculture and ecosystems are a major issue towards enhancing current thresholds in terms of farming yields and food security. Recent developments in nanotechnology allowed the designing of new generation sensors and biosensors in order to detect and mitigate these biological hazards. However, there are still important challenges concerning its respective applications in agricultural systems, typically related to point-of-care testing, cost reduction and real-time analysis. Thus, an important question arises: what are the current state-of-the-art trends and relationships among sensors and biosensors for pathogen and pest detection in agricultural systems? Targeted to meet this gap, a comparative study is performed by a literature review of the past decade and further data mining analysis. With the majority of the results coming from recent studies, leading trends towards new technologies were reviewed and identified, along with its respective agricultural application and target pathogens, such as bacteria, viruses, fungi, as well as pests like insects and parasites. Results have indicated lateral flow assay, lab-on-a-chip technologies and infrared thermography (both fixed and aerial) as the most promising categories related to sensors and biosensors driven to the detection of several different pathogenic varieties. The main existing interrelations between the results are especially associated to cereals, fruits and nuts, meat and dairy along with vegetables and legumes, mostly caused by bacterial and fungal infections. Additional results also presented and discussed, providing a fertile groundwork for decision-making and further developments in modern smart farming and IoT-based agriculture

Dichotomic role of NAADP/two-pore channel 2/Ca2+ signaling in regulating neural differentiation of mouse embryonic stem cells

Poster Presentation - Stem Cells and Pluripotency: abstract no. 1866The mobilization of intracellular Ca2+stores is involved in diverse cellular functions, including cell proliferation and differentiation. At least three endogenous Ca2+mobilizing messengers have been identified, including inositol trisphosphate (IP3), cyclic adenosine diphosphoribose (cADPR), and nicotinic adenine acid dinucleotide phosphate (NAADP). Similar to IP3, NAADP can mobilize calcium release in a wide variety of cell types and species, from plants to animals. Moreover, it has been previously shown that NAADP but not IP3-mediated Ca2+increases can potently induce neuronal differentiation in PC12 cells. Recently, two pore channels (TPCs) have been identified as a novel family of NAADP-gated calcium release channels in endolysosome. Therefore, it is of great interest to examine the role of TPC2 in the neural differentiation of mouse ES cells. We found that the expression of TPC2 is markedly decreased during the initial ES cell entry into neural progenitors, and the levels of TPC2 gradually rebound during the late stages of neurogenesis. Correspondingly, perturbing the NAADP signaling by TPC2 knockdown accelerates mouse ES cell differentiation into neural progenitors but inhibits these neural progenitors from committing to the final neural lineage. Interestingly, TPC2 knockdown has no effect on the differentiation of astrocytes and oligodendrocytes of mouse ES cells. Overexpression of TPC2, on the other hand, inhibits mouse ES cell from entering the neural lineage. Taken together, our data indicate that the NAADP/TPC2-mediated Ca2+signaling pathway plays a temporal and dichotomic role in modulating the neural lineage entry of ES cells; in that NAADP signaling antagonizes ES cell entry to early neural progenitors, but promotes late neural differentiation.postprin