Invasive pest species pose a major threat to agricultural production around the world. Until recently, the Russian wheat aphid, Diuraphis noxia Kurdjumov, a major pest of wheat and barley crops worldwide, was considered a high‐priority exotic pest threat to the Australian grains industry. Here, we document the initial detection and establishment of D. noxia in Australia in 2016. These are the first records for this genus from South Australia, Victoria and New South Wales. Morphological and molecular information is presented for confirmed diagnosis of the species based on voucher specimens. Known distribution data are provided, along with a list of Poaceae hosts on which D. noxia has been recorded, and a brief description of the typical damage symptoms caused by these aphids. The potential impact of this aphid on Australian cereal production is discussed, and we identify research areas required to underpin future management of this new threat to the Australian cereal industry.

In all cases accepted manuscripts should:  link to the formal publication via its DOI  bear a CC-BY-NC-ND license -this is easy to do, click here to find out how  if aggregated with other manuscripts, for example in a repository or other site, be shared in alignment with our hosting policy  not be added to or enhanced in any way to appear more like, or to substitute for, the published journal article Abstract: This work presents a novel biosensor using the multimode interference effect in an exposed core microstructured optical fiber (ECF). In this work biotin molecules are immobilized onto the ECF core surface to serve as the capturing probe for streptavidin, the target molecules.Since each distinct guided mode in the ECF interacts with the surrounding medium differently, the interference between any two specific modes will experience a fringe shift (or phase change) upon a change in the refractive index (RI) of the surrounding medium, or a localized RI change on the surface of the ECF core as a result of a biological binding event. In our experiment, the interferometric sensing platform was realized by splicing a section of ECF with lead-in and leadout single mode fibers (SMFs). An interference pattern is obtained in the transmission spectrum as the result of multiple excited modes (excited and re-collected at the lead-in and lead-out splicing points) propagating in the ECF with different propagation constants. The interference pattern is non-uniform, indicating that there are more than two modes involved. Fast Fourier transform (FFT) is used to separate individual interference patterns that contribute to this complex spectrum and monitor their phase changes upon RI variation of the surrounding medium. In this way multiple RI sensitivities can be realized because each spatial frequency possesses a distinct sensitivity with respect to the surrounding RI. The operation of this device was validated by measuring the phase changes that occur when the sensing platform was subjected to solutions of different RIs or functionalized with different molecules. A biosensor was demonstrated based on this novel platform using biotin as the capturing probe to detect streptavidin with low non-specific adsorption. The proposed platform is reliable, cost-effective, and offers a potential label-free biosensing alternative to the widely used surface plasmon resonance (SPR) technique.

No abstract