โ Scribed by Juan A. Correa
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
Andrews (1976) provided the first comprehensive review of the state of the knowledge on algal diseases . He drew attention to the importance of marine algal pathology, ' . . . as it relates directly to algal and indirectly to fish production . . .' . However, it was clear to Andrews at that time that algal pathology, as a discipline, had a very low profile within phycology . Reports were inconclusive, sometimes anecdotal and usually centered on the description of the infecting organisms . Andrews, himself a plant pathologist, became aware of the lack of interaction between phytopathologists and traditional phycologists who occasionally reported on algal diseases . By introducing rigorous observational and experimental protocols, similar to those used in phytopathological studies, Andrews set the standards for studying algal infectious diseases (Andrews, 1976 ;1977 ; see also Andrews & Goff, 1985) .
Since Andrews' contribution, the importance of seaweeds from an ecologic and economic perspective has been on the rise . With the world-wide interest in seaweeds and their derivatives, seaweed harvesting from wild populations has increased steadily . Seaweed farming, developed to either replace the depleted wild stocks or to improve the quality of the products, has also expanded rapidly . This scenario stresses the need to understand the relationship between seaweeds and their pathogens in both wild and cultivated populations . In this context and subsequent to the pioneering work done by Andrews, important progress has been made in a variety of algal-pathogen interactions, on aspects such as the mechanisms of infection (Apt
๐ SIMILAR VOLUMES