New Genomics-Driven Surveillance to Track Crop Diseases

Scientists from the United Kingdom have developed a new genomics strategy to track the devastating wheat yellow rust pathogen. A major fungal disease of wheat, yellow (stripe) rust caused by the fungus Puccinia striiformis Westend f. sp. tritici Eriks. (PST) has re-emerged globally in recent years.

The team of scientists from The Genome Analysis Centre (TGAC), John Innes Centre (JIC), The Sainsbury Laboratory (TSL) and the National Institute of Agricultural Botany (NIAB) developed the "field pathogenomics" that can be readily applied to these difficult pathogens. This method, based on new gene sequencing technologies, enables scientists to assess the population structure of these pathogens directly from infected field samples.

The team used this strategy to sequence PST-infected wheat leaves, and their analysis showed a marked increase in the diversity of PST and a complete change in the population composition when compared to older archived UK samples. They conclude that this is likely due to a recent introduction of a set of exotic PST variants that displaced the previous PST populations. This detailed knowledge directly influences the management of the disease and is helping breeders develop more resistant varieties to these new PST variants. This new methodology can be used to accelerate the genetic analysis of such plant pathogen populations and could potentially be widely applied to a variety of emerging plant and animal diseases.

For more details, read the news release at the NIAB website.