J.E. Vanderplank – författare

Disease Resistance in Plants, Second Edition, looks at genetic, epidemiologic, biochemical, and biometric principles for developing new cultivars possessing genetic resistance to diseases. It examines the nature of disease resistance and resistance genes, and it highlights the importance of stabilizing selection, sugar, biotrophy, and necrotrophy to obtain the greatest possible yields. Organized into 17 chapters, this volume begins with an overview of disease resistance in plants and the ways to develop disease-resistant variants. It then discusses unspecific resistance; the resistance gene paradox; susceptibility and resistance within narrow host taxa; phenotypic variation and gene numbers in host plants; discontinuous variation and cytoplasmic inheritance; and experimental difficulties in partitioning variance. The reader is also introduced to epistasis and the structure of virulence in pathogens; the notion of physiological race; how the pathogen adapts to the host; mutation in the pathogen from avirulence to virulence; horizontal and vertical resistance to disease and its epidemiological effects; and the link between protein polymorphism and vertical resistance. In addition, the book discusses genes for susceptibility in the host versus genes for avirulence (or virulence) in the pathogen; sink-induced loss of resistance; high-sugar disease processes and biotrophy; slow rusting of cereal crops; plant resistance against endemic disease; and the accumulation of resistance genes in heterogeneous host populations. This book will be useful to plant pathologists and plant breeders.

As befits a volume in the Advanced Series in Agricultural Sciences, this book was written with problems of practical agriculture in mind. One of the ways of controlling plant disease is by using resistant cultivars; and from the wide literature of genetics and biochemistry in plant pathology I have emphasized what seems to bear most closely on breeding for disease resistance. This has a double advantage, for it happens all to the good that this emphasis is also an emphasis on primary causes of disease, as distinct from subsequent processes of symptom expression and other secondary effects. The chapters are entirely modern in outlook. The great revolution in biology this century had its high moments in the elucidation of the DNA double helix in 1953 and the deciphering of the genetic code in 1961. This book, so far as I know, is the first in plant pathology to be conceived within the framework of this new biology. Half the book could not have been written 20 years ago, even if there had then been available all the literature that has since accumulated on the genetics and chemistry of plant disease. The new biology is the cement this book uses to bind the literature together. Another feature of this book is an emphasis on thermodynamics.