Stripe rust is a devastating fungal disease that afflicts wheat in many regions of the world. New races of Puccinia striiformis, the pathogen responsible for this disease, have overcome most of the known race-specific resistance genes. We report the map-based cloning of the gene Yr36 (WKS1), which confers resistance to a broad spectrum of stripe rust races at relatively high temperatures (25 de...

Byamukama, E., Tatineni, S., Hein, G. L., Graybosch, R. A., Baenziger, P. S., French, R., and Wegulo, S. N. 2012. Effects of single and double infections of winter wheat by Triticum mosaic virus and Wheat streak mosaic virus on yield determinants. Plant Dis. 96:859-864. Triticum mosaic virus (TriMV) is a recently discovered virus infecting wheat (Triticum aestivum) in the Great Plains region of...

Fusarium head blight (FHB), mainly caused by Fusarium graminearum, is a devastating disease of wheat that results in economic losses worldwide. During infection, F. graminearum produces trichothecene mycotoxins, including deoxynivalenol (DON), that increase fungal virulence and reduce grain quality. Transgenic wheat expressing a barley UDP-glucosyltransferase (HvUGT13248) were developed and eva...

Insect pests can reduce wheat yield by direct feeding and transmission of plant viruses. Here we report results from laboratory and field phenotyping studies on a wide range of wheat, including landraces from the Watkins collection deriving from before the green revolution, more modern cultivars from the Gediflux collection (north-western Europe) and modern UK Elite varieties, for resistance to...

The domestication of wheat in the Fertile Crescent 10,000 years ago led to a genetic bottleneck. Modern agriculture has further narrowed the genetic base by introducing extreme levels of uniformity on a vast spatial and temporal scale. This reduction in genetic complexity renders the crop vulnerable to new and emerging pests and pathogens. The wild relatives of wheat represent an important sour...

Quantitative resistance is likely to be more durable than major gene resistance for controlling Septoria tritici blotch (STB) on wheat. Earlier studies hypothesized that resistance affecting the degree of host damage, as measured by the percentage of leaf area covered by STB lesions, is distinct from resistance that affects pathogen reproduction, as measured by the density of pycnidia produced ...

Stripe rust, caused by Puccinia striiformis f. sp. tritici (Pst), is one of the most serious diseases of wheat; therefore, exploring effective resistance-related genes is critical for breeding and studying resistance mechanisms. However, only a few stripe rust resistance genes and defence-related genes have been cloned. Moreover, transgenic wheat with enhanced stripe rust resistance has rarely ...

the bird cherry-oat aphid, rhopalosiphum padi (l.) is a serious threat to several cereal crops. host-plant resistance to this aphid could be especially valuable in cereal crops pest management. therefore, we evaluated the development, survivorship, reproduction and population growth parameters of r. padi as resistance indices among six wheat cultivars, including gaskojen, tajan, falat, saysonz,...

that causes blast disease. First seen in Brazil, wheat blast last year caused devastating crop losses in Bangladesh. Inoue et al. tracked down the shifting genetics that have allowed the emergence of this potentially global threat to wheat crops (see the Perspective by Maekawa and Schulze-Lefert). Wheat varieties with a disabled resistance gene were susceptible to pathogen strains that affected...

The wheat leaf-rust resistance gene Lr21 was first identified in an Iranian accession of goatgrass, Aegilops tauschii Coss., the D-genome donor of hexaploid bread wheat, and was introgressed into modern wheat cultivars by breeding. To elucidate the origin of the gene, we analyzed sequences of Lr21 and lr21 alleles from 24 wheat cultivars and 25 accessions of Ae. tauschii collected along the Cas...