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Since Jan 1st 2004

Welcome to the Sorghum Anthracnose Disease site. This site is dedicated to the understanding of the sorghum foliar disease Anthracnose. It provides a brief introduction to sorghum, its history, evolution and domestication; information on the anthracnose pathogen, its impact on sorghum production, and the relationship between the anthracnose pathogen and the sorghum plant.

What is Sorghum? You can find out by clicking on the Introduction button in the menu on the left. In the introduction you will find information on the history, taxonomy, evolution and domestication of sorghum. There are also numerous links to references and books in the Further Reading section, where you will find selected books available to buy through our Online Bookstore, an association with Amazon.com.

What is Anthracnose? The term 'anthracnose' literally means 'like coal', and is used in an aetiological sense for diseases caused by fungi in the genus Colletotrichum. On susceptible plants, disease symptoms include small, elliptical black lesions, less than 5 mm in diameter that develop circular, straw-coloured centres with wide margins that may vary in colour from reddish-blackish purple. On susceptible cultivars anthracnose may defoliate the plant and in severe cases, plants will die before they reach maturity. Anthracnose also occurs on the stalks, where it is known as stalk or red rot, panicles (head rot) and the grain.

Colletotrichum is one of the more important genera of plant pathogenic fungi that contains many different species causing diseases on a wide range of important crop plants. Several species are of importance as model systems for studying infection processes, phytoalexins, resistance mechanisms, biochemistry and genetics of host specificity, thereby increasing our understanding of the mechanisms of pathogenesis and of plant disease resistance.

The C. sublineolum/Sorghum pathosystem has been used as a model system for studying phytoalexin mechanisms. It is an ideal system for this as unlike most phytoalexins, those of sorghum are orange-red pigmented flavonoids. This allows their accumulation and distribution in plant tissue to be followed using light microscopy.