A team of Agricultural Research Service and university scientists released two new oat germplasm lines to shore up the crop’s defenses against the devastating fungal disease crown rust.  The team specifically created the oat lines so that they could be crossed with elite commercial varieties to fortify them with new genetic sources of resistance to crown rust.  The disease can be a plague upon oats worldwide and inflict grain losses of up to 50% in unprotected crops.  The crown rust fungus is a genetically diverse pathogen and highly adept at evolving into new virulent forms called races.  This can happen so quickly that the average productive life of an oat variety with seedling resistance is between three and five years, necessitating the use of chemical fungicides in conventional production systems.

 

“Currently, the majority of the oat varieties with rust resistance carry a gene or two for resistance (often referred to as seedling resistance) to a specific isolate of crown rust,” said Shahryar Kianian, a co-author on the journal paper and research leader of the ARS Cereal Diseases Laboratory in St. Paul, MN.  “Adult plant resistance, sometimes referred to as ‘slow rusting,’ provides the oat plant some immunity—but not complete immunity.  In this case, the selection pressure on the pathogen to change is reduced, and the plant is not damaged much so that it can still produce and yield grain for the growers.”

 

The sturdy oat lines have been propagated for their seed, which is available for a variety of development programs.

 

Learn more about the new lines, by visiting ARS' Website.

 

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