Global strain of emerging wheat disease fungus identified by genomic surveillance

Wheat field - A field in the Mpika District, Muchinga Province, Zambia, showing symptoms of wheat blast during the outbreak of March 2018. Image by Batiseba Tembo, Zambia Agriculture Research Institute (CC-BY 4.0,  https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4. Genomic surveillance could aid in tracking pathogen evolution and crop resistance, preventing crop failures, suggests a new study co-led by UCL researchers. The new PLOS Biology paper, conducted by an international team of researchers from four continents, suggests that surveillance could help manage emerging crop diseases and identify genetic traits for breeding disease-resistant crops. The findings highlight the threat that pests and diseases pose to global wheat yields, which could be reduced by over 20%. One of the emerging diseases that poses a threat to wheat crops worldwide is wheat blast, a fungal disease that is now present in three continents. To better understand the disease, its origins, and its genetic makeup, researchers combined genome analyses and laboratory experiments, by which they determined the susceptibility of wheat varieties to the wheat blast fungus, and of wheat blast fungus to fungicides.