By Trina Kleist
On a sunny day in early April, young wheat plants stood waist-high in test fields near the UC Davis campus, their heads full of still-green grain. A walk along some furrows left pants and boots covered with a fine, orange dust. These plants were bred to fight a stubborn pathogen that threatens the world’s wheat: stripe rust.
Already, information about the genetic line-up of these plants is available to researchers and breeders on GRIN-Global, a web-based software system used by gene banks around the world. This “gene catalogue” now has information, developed by the UC Davis Small Grains Breeding Program, about stripe rust resistance genes for both durum wheat, the kind used for pasta, and common wheat, used for bread.
In this field, scientists in the program are focused on pasta wheat. In two to three years, their breeding trials are expected to produce new cultivars for farmers, offering more durable resistance to stripe rust.
Program researchers also are developing breeding populations of bread wheat that carry genes to fight this devastating pathogen.
Standing between two breeding test plots of durum wheat, project scientist Joshua Hegarty pulled a leaf off a plant; it showed long, pale, stripe-like lesions, the fatal scars of stripe rust. He grabbed a plant in the neighboring test plot; its leaf looked green and healthy, though a closer look revealed pinhead-sized yellow flecks on the surface.
Source : ucdavis.edu