Role of Individual Components of Disease Triangle in Disease Development: A Review

Food security has become an important issue at present world. It is estimated that, on a global scale, pathogens and pests are reducing crop yields for five major food crops namely, rice, wheat, maize, soybean and potato by 10 to 40 percent. Mitigating the losses due to plant diseases will obviously help in meeting the growing demand for quality food production. For this, all the factors affecting disease development must be understood clearly and appropriate management strategies must be followed. This review discusses these three major factors; host, pathogen and environment. Temperature, light, relative humidity/moisture are important aerial and edaphic environmental factors that are considered to have major impact on disease development. Development of resistant cultivars and suppressing virulence factors in pathogens are critical to disease control.