ABSTRACT
Introduction About 30% of the world's annual agricultural production is lost primarily due to diseases and pests and constitute the major constraints to improve crop production all over the world. No country is immune to the adverse effects of plant pathogens. The host pathogen interactions and drastic alterations in metabolic processes are very crucial as also a basic phenomenon, resulting in catastrophic crop failure. Looking at the global population explosion, efforts to protect our crops from diseases necessitate new strategies for improving crop yield. The investigations into host pathogen interaction and metabolic alterations during pathogenesis would pave the way into the new, innovative, novel methods for plant disease management. Host plants defense or resistance towards invading pathogens is mainly dependent on the type of host pathogen interaction and the physiological or biochemical alterations taking place in the host plant body. Structural alterations add to this . .Knowledge of the mechanism of defense in the host plant has a tremendous potential in crop protection and disease management practices. These studies provide meaningful information on the factors responsible for the virulence of the pathogen, the mechanism of pathogenesis and the resistance of the host-pathogen interaction at molecular levels for evaluating sugarcane genotypes using biochemical markers, metabolic disorders in the host, etc.
