Fungal diseases afflicting sweet potatoes cause huge post-harvest losses in the industry worldwide. Due to the overproduction, excess sweet potatoes must be stored in large-scale warehouses. Storage can increase the susceptibility of fungal infections, especially airborne fungal diseases. An early warning system that indicates infection would benefit the industry. For a disease diagnosis system to be effective, it should be both noninvasive and rapid. In order to meet that goal, a set of volatile or semivolatile biomarkers needs to be discovered that indicate disease. We performed a time basis pilot experiment in a warehouse stimulated environment to screen microbial volatile organic compounds. Rhizopus stolonifer has been recognized as an airborne fungal pathogen for sweet potatoes, hence it was used in this experiment to infect the sweet potatoes initially. Volatile organic compounds released from Rhizopus infected and healthy sweet potatoes were analyzed using HS-SPME GC-MS. Although we used Rhizopus as the fungal inoculation, the infected tissues showed additional fungal infections from Aspergillus and Fusarium. Therefore, the collected volatile profiles might include emissions from Rhizopus, Aspergillus and Fusarium pathogenicity on sweet potatoes. The emission of volatile and semivolatile organic compounds variation during the fungal infection, as well as the comparative metabolomics of healthy and infected sweet potatoes and diagnostic biomarkers for the fungal pathogenicity, will be discussed in this presentation.

Identification of volatile diagnostic markers of fungal infection on stored sweet potatoes in warehouses – a pilot study

ACS Fall 2020 Virtual Meeting

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