H
haole
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Well, as your post states, 'dud' derives from Middle English. I am sure many people here know that science however has an inherent bias for words of Latin origination. The synonymous word in the field is "aberrant growth." Aberrant='not normal/expected.' You can see that this in fact is very similar to your definition of dud, "a thing that fails to work properly.' So it is not necessarily stupid; any pathologist worth their salt would stick to generalist terms 'til they had tissue in hand performing assays and getting positive identifications. So while I suppose we could all refer to aberrant growth rather than dud, I think the argument is semantic, and does not inherently 'bring the community backwards.' Few here are qualified to describe their plant symptoms in a scientific way. Furthermore, a detailed discussion of specific symptoms on specific hosts, what scientists attempted to do for decades before effective molecular biology techniques existed, in fact at times brought them backwards, as it was later found that we are often dealing with identical or nearly identical (genomically, or genus:species-wise) organisms/viruses,etc. that produce different symptoms with different host phenotypes, or because they are different pathovars/strains/isolates. I am afraid that I personally believe that while symptoms should be recorded and compared, they should only be done so with a grain of salt, until we can confirm symptoms are definitely associated with said pathogen through controlled studies, clean material, isolated pathogens, and protection from other pathogens. It could well be found afterward that these plants that have lost all vigor have to have a specific set of 3 combined pathogens and this is not produced by any one.
What I believe brings the community backward is not paying attention to the details of the discussions here. Since it is in fact likely that there are different pathogens that are causing problems for people here, as you point out, some could have bacteria, some oomycetes, others could have viruses or other microorganisms, others nematodes, and some could have all of the above, generalist terms about symptoms are preferred, and I for one therefore am not opposed to the terminology within which our conversation is happening considering what limited info there is available. I believe that the thread format is not functional here and that all pictures should be compiled in a single place and compared, but even if we did, different lights/environments/phenos/ etc etc, would still mean there is possibly little we would learn and we'd still revert to the language of dud.
Let's define dud though, I do agree we should ensure we are discussing the same general symptom type. My assumed meaning of dud here is 'loss of plant vigor.' While this is more specific than the 'aberrant growth' I gave above, as it appears to be different than chlorosis, mottling, mosaic, die-back, and other symptoms, for all we know all of these different mentioned symptoms may be produced by the same causative agent that is expressing itself in different ways due to environmental or host factors. In addition, there are probably thousands of different causative agents of general 'loss of plant of vigor.'
If anyone wants to perform a local lesion assay, which as I mentioned is the first and classic way of testing for a virus, and is very cheap to execute but requires some preparation and simple tools, I'd be happy to give enough info here that it could be carried out, or I am sure the same info can be found on the net.
What I believe brings the community backward is not paying attention to the details of the discussions here. Since it is in fact likely that there are different pathogens that are causing problems for people here, as you point out, some could have bacteria, some oomycetes, others could have viruses or other microorganisms, others nematodes, and some could have all of the above, generalist terms about symptoms are preferred, and I for one therefore am not opposed to the terminology within which our conversation is happening considering what limited info there is available. I believe that the thread format is not functional here and that all pictures should be compiled in a single place and compared, but even if we did, different lights/environments/phenos/ etc etc, would still mean there is possibly little we would learn and we'd still revert to the language of dud.
Let's define dud though, I do agree we should ensure we are discussing the same general symptom type. My assumed meaning of dud here is 'loss of plant vigor.' While this is more specific than the 'aberrant growth' I gave above, as it appears to be different than chlorosis, mottling, mosaic, die-back, and other symptoms, for all we know all of these different mentioned symptoms may be produced by the same causative agent that is expressing itself in different ways due to environmental or host factors. In addition, there are probably thousands of different causative agents of general 'loss of plant of vigor.'
If anyone wants to perform a local lesion assay, which as I mentioned is the first and classic way of testing for a virus, and is very cheap to execute but requires some preparation and simple tools, I'd be happy to give enough info here that it could be carried out, or I am sure the same info can be found on the net.
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