A Mixed Methods Assessment of an Online Mental Health and Resilience Program for Agricultural Sector Students.

Financial, environmental, and socio-cultural challenges affect the mental health and wellbeing of those working and living on-farm. Education programs can help in improving mental health and overall wellbeing, but most of these programs are offered to established farmers in a face-to-face format, leading to a gap in offerings to many subgroups, including young agricultural entrants. To address these gaps, this paper assesses the value of an online mental health and resilience education program for young agricultural entrants.

A multi-target, non-infectious and clonable artificial positive control for routine PCR-based assays.

Positive controls are essential for PCR reliability and are challenging to obtain for rare, exotic and/or emerging pathogens and pose biosafety risks if manufactured using infectious pathogens. Custom synthetic DNA inserts can be designed de novo in tandems of forward and reverse complement priming sequences to be inserted in circular plasmid vectors. To test this concept, artificial positive controls (APCs) for use in PCR were synthesized to contain primer sequences targeting four viruses (Barley yellow dwarf virus, Soilborne wheat mosaic virus, Triticum mosaic virus and Wheat streak mosaic virus) pathogenic to wheat and, as internal control, the plant mitochondrial nad5 gene.

Detection and discrimination of members of the family Luteoviridae by real-time PCR and SYBR® GreenER™ melting curve analysis.

This study investigated the suitability of a two step real-time RT-PCR melting curve analysis as a tool for the detection and discrimination of nine species in the plant virus family Luteoviridae, being Soybean dwarf virus [SbDV], Bean leafroll virus [BLRV], Beet chlorosis virus [BChV], Beet mild yellowing virus [BMYV], Beet western yellows virus [BWYV], Cereal yellow dwarf virus-RPV [CYDV-RPV], Cucurbit aphid-borne yellows virus [CABYV], Potato leafroll virus [PLRV] and Turnip yellows virus [TuYV]. Melting temperature and shape of the melting peak were analysed for 68 bp and 148 bp coat protein gene amplicons using SYBR® GreenER™ fluorescent dye. Specific melting peaks with unique melting temperature were observed for the various species of the family Luteoviridae using the 68 bp amplicon, but not with the 148 bp amplicon.