Symposium : Disease Tolerance

With this edition of scientific texts dealing with disease tolerance in sunflower, we present you the first issue of a new collection compiled and published by the International Sunflower Association.

The aim of this collection is to focus on important research themes linked to sunflower and characterized by multi-field aspects.

Under such conditions, it is not easy to organize communication and develop discussions within the scientific community. That is why ISA would like to bring its contribution to the organization of a symposium with the publication of articles.

This first Symposium on Disease Tolerance was held during the 14th International Sunflower Conference in Beijing in June 1996.

The presentation of the following papers follows a classical line, each disease being studied one after the other. Another approach would have been to consider the state of the art and deal with technical or scientific approaches applied to all diseases (for example, molecular marking, the relationships between hosts and parents, the development of tests, field experiments), but it seemed that present priorities of research were slightly different from one disease to the other one.

It is our hope that despite its imperfections, this publication will provide readers with useful and original information and we would like to thank the authors for their participations.

André POUZET