COMPARISON OF VERTICILLIUM SOIL DETECTION METHODS USING GENETICALLY TRANSFORMED GREEN FLUORESCING ISOLATES, 2001

Traditional methods to quantify Verticillium species in soil rely on the growth of the fungus in semi-selective agar media. Estimates of soil populations from these plating assays are known to vary between methods and researchers. Yet, until recently, traditional assays could only be compared with each other in order to assess their accuracy. Recently, a mint isolate of Verticillium dahliae was genetically transformed with a green fluorescent protein (gfp). This novel research tool may be used to quantify Verticillium in soil. We developed a technique to estimate Verticillium soil populations by visualizing the fluorescence of these gfp isolates. Subsequently, we compared the accuracy of the traditional soil assay methods for Verticillium with that of fluorescent isolate visualization