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Contributed by Andrew Chapple, Assistant Press Officer, Norwich BioScience Institutes

Among the many fungal pathogens that infect wheat, yellow rust is a serious disease in temperate and maritime regions of the world. In the UK and Northern Europe yellow rust is an annual disease and without the necessary control measures would produce devastating epidemic year after year. Many sources of yellow rust resistance deployed in wheat cultivars have proven short lived. Within a short period from release of a new yellow rust resistant cultivar, resistance has become ineffective, new pathogenic isolates of the pathogen having evolved within the pathogen population. Strategies of resistance breeding are required to overcome this short term Boom and Bust cycle of resistance gene deployment. One such strategy is to stack effective resistance genes with different modes of action within the same wheat genotype. This can only be achieved with the use of molecular tools that independently identify each resistance source.

During the last few years, these molecular tools have been developed at the John Innes Centre for two sources of wheat yellow rust resistance, Yr5 and Yr10. Both Yr5 and Yr10 remain effective against yellow rust in the UK and Europe and therefore represent potentially useful sources of resistance. As part of an EU Framework 6 Integrated Programme – BioExploit these molecular tools are being used to stack Yr5 and Yr10 in the development of new wheat cultivars by the breeding company, Bioplante-Florimond Desprez, France.

Lesley Boyd of the John Innes Centre has been successful in a bid for funding to look at genetic diversity and develop molecular markers for novel sources of resistance to the diseases of yellow rust and stem rust in African wheat genotypes. Her research is in collaboration with colleagues at the University of the Free State, South Africa and the National Agricultural Research Centres in Kenya. The outputs from their 4 year programme will feed into the Global Rust Initiative, which was set up after the appearance of the new, virulent stem rust isolate Ug99 in East Africa in 1999.

The funding comes from the Department for International Development (DFID) and the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC)’s new joint funding scheme for research on sustainable agriculture for international development.
 

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