CIMMYT researcher Bram Govaerts participates in the World Food Prize and Borlaug Dialogue.
Expertise, multiple achievements and a significant contribution to sustainable agri-food systems in Mexico and globally, have merited Bram Govaerts, director of the Integrated Development Program and regional representative for the Americas at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT), Cornell University’s appointment as Andrew D. White Professor-at-Large. This is a distinction granted to individuals whose work in science, education, social sciences, literature and creative arts has had great impact and international visibility.
Cornell University launched the Professors-at-Large program to commemorate its centenary and to honor its first president, Andrew D. White. The program secures a connection between the university and its faculty with the world, global issues, great thinkers and outstanding intellectuals. Since then, personalities such as philosopher Jacques Derrida, writer and poet Octavio Paz, geneticist M. S. Swaminathan, and Nobel Peace Prize recipient Norman Borlaug have received this distinction.
“I was honored to learn about my nomination and glad to be interviewed, but I was happily surprised and humbled to learn that I had been chosen to join this group of distinguished thinkers and artists, which has welcomed such outstanding members as Norman Borlaug and Octavio Paz,” said Govaerts.
Professors-at-Large take the responsibility to participate, over a six-year period, in several activities that strengthen the international academic community and are, afterwards, considered distinguished and lifetime members of the university.
Govaerts takes inspiration from the “take it to the farmer” vision, and has been instrumental to the development of CIMMYT’s project portfolio, which integrates innovations in maize and wheat production systems by minimizing their environmental impact.
Govaerts shares this acknowledgement with his team and collaborators who have joined efforts to achieve the objectives set in Colombia, Ethiopia, Guatemala, Mexico and many other countries that have taken the decision to make a difference.
In 2014, Bram Govaerts received from the World Food Prize Foundation the Norman E. Borlaug Award for Field Research and Application, endowed by the Rockefeller Foundation, for leading the MasAgro project and finding innovative ways of applying science to improve the productivity and resilience of small and medium-sized maize and wheat farmers in Mexico.
The burning of crop residue, or stubble, across millions of hectares of cropland between planting seasons is a visible contributor to air pollution in both rural and urban areas of India. (Photo: Dakshinamurthy Vedachalam/CIMMYT)
Groundwater conservation policies are contributing to the air pollution crisis in northwestern India by concentrating agricultural fires into a narrower window when weather conditions favor poor air quality, according to a new study by the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) published on Nature Sustainability.
Facing severe groundwater depletion from intensive crop cultivation, the state governments of Haryana and Punjab introduced separate legislation in 2009 to prohibit early rice establishment in order to reduce water consumption. The study revealed that later rice planting results in later rice harvest, leading to a delayed and condensed period when residues are burned prior to wheat establishment. Consequently, more farmers are setting fire to crop residues at the same time, increasing peak fire intensity by 39%, contributing significantly to atmospheric pollution.
“Despite being illegal, the burning of post-harvest rice residues continues to be the most common practice of crop residue management in northwestern India, and while groundwater policies are helping arrest water depletion, they also appear to be exacerbating one of the most acute public health problems confronting India,” said CIMMYT scientist Balwinder Singh.
“Burning agricultural waste dominantly releases PM2.5 aerosols, a type of fine particulate matter that is particularly harmful to human health,” he explained.
A holistic view of policies to support sustainable development
Farmers work on rice paddies. (Photo: Dakshinamurthy Vedachalam/CIMMYT)
The research results shed light on the sustainability challenges confronting many highly productive agricultural systems, where addressing one problem can exacerbate others, said Andrew McDonald, a professor at Cornell University and co-author of the study.
“Identifying and managing tradeoffs and capitalizing on synergies between crop productivity, resource conservation, and environmental quality is essential,” McDonald said.
“To devise more effective agricultural development programs and policies, integrative assessments are required that meld groundwater, air quality, economic, and technology scaling considerations in common frameworks,” he explained.
The current policy environment in India encourages productivity maximization of cereals and very high levels of residue production especially in the western Indo-Gangetic Plains, according to Bruno Gerard, another author of the study and head of CIMMYT’s Sustainable Intensification Program.
“If these policies are changed, companion efforts must facilitate sustainable intensification in areas such as the Eastern Gangetic Plains, where water resources are relatively abundant and closer coupling of crop-livestock systems provides a diverse set of end-uses for crops residues,” Gerard said.
The way forward
Northwestern India is home to millions of smallholder farmers and a global breadbasket for grain staples, accounting for 85% of the wheat procured by the Indian government. Thus, what happens here has regional and global ramifications for food security.
“A sensible approach for overcoming tradeoffs will embrace agronomic technologies such as the Happy Seeder, a seed drill that plants seeds without impacting crop residue, providing farmers the technical means to avoid residue burning,” said ML Jat, a scientist with CIMMYT who coordinates sustainable intensification programs in northwestern India.
“Through continued efforts on the technical refinement and business model development for the Happy Seeder technology, uptake has accelerated,” he added. “Financial incentives in the form of payments for ecosystem services may provide an additional boost to adoption.”
“Additional agronomic management measure such as cultivation of shorter-duration rice varieties may help arrest groundwater decline while reducing the damaging concentration of agricultural burning,” Jat explained.
The researchers suggested that long-term solutions will likely require crop diversification away from rice towards crops that demand less water, like maize, as recently started by the government in the state of Haryana.
The International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) is the global leader in publicly funded maize and wheat research and related farming systems. Headquartered near Mexico City, CIMMYT works with hundreds of partners throughout the developing world to sustainably increase the productivity of maize and wheat cropping systems, thus improving global food security and reducing poverty. CIMMYT is a member of CGIAR and leads the CGIAR Research Programs on Maize and Wheat, and the Excellence in Breeding Platform. The center receives support from national governments, foundations, development banks and other public and private agencies.
Climate-change-induced heat stress and disease pathogens migrating across borders threaten the world’s wheat supply and food security in Africa and the Middle East. Building on the Durable Rust Resistance in Wheat (DRRW) global partnership, Delivering Genetic Gain in Wheat (DGGW) will mitigate serious threats to wheat brought about by climate change and develop and deploy new strains of wheat that are heat tolerant as well as resistant to wheat rusts and other diseases.
DGGW uses modern tools of comparative genomics and big data to develop and deploy varieties of wheat that incorporate climate resiliency as well as improved disease resistance for smallholder farmers in these politically vulnerable regions.”
The four-year grant builds on the successes of the BGRI, led by the DRRW project, funded by the UK Department for International Development and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation from 2008 to 2016.
Deadly wheat pathogens have been moving from the wheat fields of northern and East Africa into the Middle East. In their rush to identify genes that can resist evolving and virulent new strains of the disease known as stem rust, BGRI scientists have developed collaborative arrangements and facilities, with the crucial support of national governments and agencies, to screen thousands of samples of wheat each year from every continent under rust infection, to identify resistant lines.
DGGW is based at Cornell University and acts as the secretariat for the BGRI. Collaborations continue with national partners in Kenya and Ethiopia, as well as scientists at international agricultural research centers that focus on wheat, including CIMMYT and the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas.
Advanced research laboratories in the U.S., Canada, China, Turkey, Denmark, Australia and South Africa collaborate on the project. So far, more than 2,000 scientists from 35 international institutions spread across 23 countries are involved in the consortium, and 37 countries contribute data to the surveillance network.
Objectives
Mitigate serious threats to wheat brought about by climate change
Develop new strains of heat-tolerant wheat
Develop rust and disease resistant wheat
Monitor spread of stem rust and other windborne wheat diseases
Secretary Villalobos (center) tours the wheat fields at the experimental station in Obregón with CIMMYT scientists. (Photo: Ernesto Blancarte)
“The dream has become a reality.” These words by Victor Manuel Villalobos Arambula, Secretary of Agriculture and Rural Development of Mexico, summed up the sentiment felt among the attendees at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) Global Wheat Program Visitors’ Week in Ciudad Obregon, Sonora.
In support of the contributions to global and local agricultural programs, Villalobos spoke at the week’s field day, or “Dia de Campo,” in front of more than 200 CIMMYT staff and visitors hailing from more than 40 countries on March 20, 2019.
Villalobos recognized the immense work ahead in the realm of food security, but was optimistic that young scientists could carry on the legacy of Norman Borlaug by using the tools and lessons that he left behind. “It is important to multiply our efforts to be able to address and fulfill this tremendous demand on agriculture that we will face in the near future,” he stated.
The annual tour at the Campo Experimental Norman E. Borlaug allows the global wheat community to see new wheat varieties, learn about latest research findings, and hold meetings and discussions to collaborate on future research priorities.
Given the diversity of attendees and CIMMYT’s partnerships, it is no surprise that there were several high-level visits to the field day.
A high-level delegation from India, including Balwinder Singh Sidhu, commissioner of agriculture for the state of Punjab, AK Singh, deputy director general for agricultural extension at the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR), and AS Panwar, director of ICAR’s Indian Institute of Farming Systems Research, joined the tour and presentations. All are longtime CIMMYT collaborators on efforts to scale up and disseminate sustainable intensification and climate smart farming practices.
Panwar, who is working with CIMMYT and partners to develop typologies of Indian farming systems to more effectively promote climate smart practices, was particularly interested in the latest progress in biofortification.
“One of the main objectives of farming systems is to meet nutrition of the farming family. And these biofortified varieties can be integrated into farming systems,” he said.
Secretary Villalobos (right) and Hans Braun, Program Director for CIMMYT’s Global Wheat Program, stand for a photograph in a wheat field at the experimental station in Obregón. (Photo: Ernesto Blancarte)
In addition, a delegation from Tunisia, including dignitaries from Tunisia’s National Institute of Field Crops (INGC), signed a memorandum of understanding with CIMMYT officials to promote cooperation in research and development through exchange visits, consultations and joint studies in areas of mutual interest such as the diversification of production systems. INGC, which conducts research and development, training and dissemination of innovation in field crops, is already a strong partner in the CGIAR Research Program on Wheat’s Precision Phenotyping Platform for Wheat Septoria leaf blight.
At the close of the field day, CIMMYT wheat scientist Carolina Rivera was honored as one of the six recipients of the annual Jeanie Borlaug Laube Women in Triticum (WIT) Early Career Award. The award offers professional development opportunities for women working in wheat. “Collectively, these scientists are emerging as leaders across the wheat community,” said Maricelis Acevedo, Associate Director for Science for Cornell University’s Delivering Genetic Gain in Wheat Project, who announced Rivera’s award.
CGIAR Research Program on Wheat and Global Wheat Program Director Hans Braun also took the opportunity to honor and thank three departing CIMMYT wheat scientists. Alexey Morgounov, Carlos Guzman and Mohammad Reza Jalal Kamali received Yaquis, or statues of a Yaqui Indian. The figure of the Yaqui Indian is a Sonoran symbol of beauty and the gifts of the natural world, and the highest recognition given by the Global Wheat Program.
The overarching thread that ran though the Visitor’s Week was that all were in attendance because of their desire to benefit the greater good through wheat science. As retired INIFAP director and Global Wheat Program Yaqui awardee Antonio Gándara said, recalling his parents’ guiding words, “Siempre, si puedes, hacer algo por los demas, porque es la mejor forma de hacer algo por ti. [Always, if you can, do something for others, because it’s the best way to do something for yourself].”
Participants in the Field Day 2019 at the experimental station in Obregón stand for a group photo. (Photo: Ernesto Blancarte)
Yellow spores of the fungus Puccinia striiformis f.sp. tritici, which causes stripe rust disease in wheat. Photo: CIMMYT/Mike Listman.
Rapidly emerging and evolving races of wheat stem rust and stripe rust disease—the crop’s deadliest scourges worldwide—drove large-scale seed replacement by Ethiopia’s farmers during 2009-14, as the genetic resistance of widely-grown wheat varieties no longer proved effective against the novel pathogen strains, according to a new study by the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center(CIMMYT).
Based on two surveys conducted by CIMMYT and the Ethiopian Institute of Agricultural Research(EIAR) and involving more than 2,000 Ethiopian wheat farmers, the study shows that farmers need access to a range of genetically diverse wheat varieties whose resistance is based on multiple genes.
After a severe outbreak in 2010-11 of a previously unseen stripe rust strain, 40 percent of the affected farm households quickly replaced popular but susceptible wheat varieties, according to Moti Jaleta, agricultural economist at CIMMYT and co-author of the publication.
“That epidemic hit about 600,000 hectares of wheat—30 percent of Ethiopia’s wheat lands—and farmers said it cut their yields in half,” Jaleta said. “In general, the rapid appearance and mutation of wheat rust races in Ethiopia has convinced farmers about the need to adopt newer, resistant varieties.”
The fourth most widely grown cereal after tef, maize, and sorghum, wheat in Ethiopia is produced largely by smallholder farmers under rainfed conditions. Wheat production and area under cultivation have increased significantly in the last decade and Ethiopia is among Africa’s top three wheat producers, but the country still imports on average 1.4 million tons of wheat per year to meet domestic demand.
National and international organizations such as EIAR, CIMMYT, and the International Centre for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA) are working intensely to identify and incorporate new sources of disease resistance into improved wheat varieties and to support the multiplication of more seed to meet farmer demand.
New wheat varieties have provided bigger harvests and incomes for Ethiopia farmers in the last decade, but swiftly mutating and spreading disease strains are endangering wheat’s future, according to Dave Hodson, CIMMYT expert in geographic information and decision support systems, co-author of the new study.
Ethiopian wheat farmers like Abebe Abora, of Doyogena, have benefitted from adopting high-yielding wheat varieties but face threats from fast mutating races of wheat rust disease pathogens. Photo: CIMMYT/Apollo Habtamu.
“In addition to stripe rust, highly-virulent new races of stem rust are ruining wheat harvests in eastern Africa,” he explained. “These include the deadly Ug99 race group, which has spread beyond the region, and, more recently, the stem rust race TKTTF.”
As an example, he mentioned the case of the wheat variety Digalu, which is resistant to stripe rust and was quickly adopted by farmers after the 2010-11 epidemic. But Digalu has recently shown susceptibility to TKTTF stem rust and must now be replaced.
“In rust-prone Ethiopia, the risks of over-reliance on a widely-sown variety that is protected by a single, major resistance gene—Digalu, for example—are clearly apparent,” he added. “CIMMYT and partners are working hard to replace it with a new variety whose resistance is genetically more complex and durable.”
Hodson said as well that continuous monitoring of the rust populations in Ethiopia and the surrounding region is essential to detect and respond to emerging threats, as well as to ensure that the key pathogen races are used to screen for resistance in wheat breeding programs.
Hodson and partners at the John Innes Centre, UK, and EIAR are leading development of a handheld tool that allows rapid identification of disease strains in the field, instead of having to send them to a laboratory and lose precious time awaiting the results.
CIMMYT and partners are also applying molecular tools to study wheat varietal use in Ethiopia. “There are indications that yields reported by farmers were much lower than official statistics, and farmer recollections of varietal names and other information are not always exact,” Hodson explained. “We are analyzing results now of a follow-up study that uses DNA fingerprinting to better document varietal use and turnover.”
Wheat stem rust was reported by the Greeks and Romans, and the latter sacrificed to the gods to avoid disease outbreaks on their wheat crops. Photo: CIMMYT/Petr Kosina
As reported today in Communications Biology, an international team of researchers led by the John Innes Centre, U.K., found that 80 percent of U.K. wheat varieties are susceptible to the deadly stem rust strain. The group also confirmed for the first time in many decades that the stem rust fungus was growing on barberry bush, the pathogen’s alternate host, in the UK.
“This signals the rising threat of stem rust disease for wheat and barley production in Europe,” said Dave Hodson, senior scientist at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) and co-author on the study.
A scourge of wheat since biblical times, stem rust caused major losses to North American wheat crops in the early 20th century. Stem rust disease was controlled for decades through the use of resistant wheat varieties bred in the 1950s by scientist Norman Borlaug and his colleagues. Widespread adoption of those varieties sparked the Green Revolution of the 1960s and 70s.
In 1999 a new, highly-virulent strain of the stem rust fungus emerged in eastern Africa. Spores of that strain and variants have spread rapidly and are threatening or overcoming the genetic resistance of many currently sown wheat varieties. Scientists worldwide joined forces in the early 2000s to develop new, resistant varieties and to monitor and control outbreaks of stem rust and yellow rust, as part of collaborations such as the Borlaug Global Rust Initiative led by Cornell University.
Barberry is a shrub found throughout the temperate and subtropical regions. Photo: John Innes Centre
The Communications Biology study shows that 2013 U.K. stem rust strain is related to TKTTF, a fungal race first detected in Turkey that spread across the Middle East and recently into Europe. It was the dominant race in the 2013 stem rust outbreak in Germany and infected 10,000 hectares of wheat in Ethiopia’s breadbasket the same year.
Because disease organisms mutate quickly to overcome crop resistance controlled by single genes, researchers are rushing to identify new resistance genes and to incorporate multiple genes into high-yielding varieties, according to Ravi Singh, CIMMYT wheat scientist who participated in the reported study.
“The greatest hope for achieving durable resistance to rust diseases is to make wheat’s resistance genetically complex, combining several genes and resistance mechanisms,” Singh explained.
Barberry, which serves as a spawning ground for the stem rust fungus, was largely eradicated from the U.K. and U.S. last century, greatly reducing the spread and genetic diversification of rust disease races. Now barberry is being grown again in the U.K. over the last decade, according to Diane G.O. Saunders, John Innes Centre scientist and co-author of the study.
“The late Nobel laureate Norman Borlaug said that the greatest ally of the pathogen is our short memory,” Saunders stated. “We recommend continued, intensive resistance breeding. We would also welcome work with conservationists of endangered, barberry-dependent insect species to ensure that planting of common barberry occurs away from arable land, thus safeguarding European cereals from a large-scale re-emergence of wheat stem rust.”
Click here to read the John Innes Centre media release about the Communications Biology report and view the report.
A sunny November day brings hundreds of farmer seed producers to Doyogena, a scenic highland village in Ethiopia’s Southern Nations, Nationalities, and Peoples’ Region (SNNP). The visitors form a bustling line to collect more than $90 each – on average – in profits from representatives of the Zereta Kembata Seed Multiplication and Marketing Union.
Ethiopian farmer seed producers collect payment at the Zereta Kembata Seed Multiplication and Marketing Union facility, in Doyogena. Photo: CIMMYT/A. Habtamu
“The union receives seed grown by more than 1,100 farmers, several hundred of whom are women, belonging to 8 farmer cooperatives,” said Yosief Balewold, general manager of the union.
With help from Ethiopia’s Agricultural Transformation Agency, Zereta Kembata began in 2016 to collect, clean, pack, and sell seed of wheat, potato, sorghum, and faba bean. “This year we marketed nearly 27 tons of the new, disease resistant wheat seed; that’s enough to sow around 270 hectares of the crop.”
Pitted against a yearly onslaught of fast-evolving fungal diseases that can infect as much as $200 million worth of the crops they are growing, more than 75,000 small-scale wheat farmers in Ethiopia’s 4 major wheat-growing regions will have gained access by late 2017 to a vital asset—over 400 tons of new, disease resistant wheat varieties of wheat seed, much of it produced by other farmers.
Marketed in tandem with science-based recommendations for growing wheat, the annual seed supply has steadily increased since 2014 through the Wheat Seed Scaling Initiative, led by the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) and funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).
“We’re energizing and diversifying Ethiopia’s wheat seed sector, partly by involving and benefitting both formal and farmer seed producers, including women and men,” said Bekele Abeyo, a CIMMYT scientist who leads the project.
With money from union shares purchased by farmer cooperatives and a regulatory 30 percent reinvestment of earnings, the union is building a large warehouse to store seed. In a smaller shack nearby sits a 0.75 ton steel seed cleaner donated by the Wheat Seed Scaling Initiative, which has been working with Zereta Kembata and other seed producers identified as outstanding by SNNP policymakers.
Abebe Abora, farmer in the Doyogena District of Ethiopia’s Southern Nations, Nationalities, and Peoples’ Region (SNNP), has been a member of a seed production cooperative for four years. “Modern technology such as improved wheat varieties has made farming better for me than it was for my father,” he said. Photo: CIMMYT/A. Habtamu
“Ethiopia has seen a rapid rise in recent years of new and deadly strains of stem rust and yellow rust, wheat adversaries since biblical times that have lately mutated to overcome resistance genes bred into many modern wheat varieties,” said Ayele Badebo, a CIMMYT wheat pathologist based in Ethiopia. “Farmers must swiftly begin to sow a range of varieties bearing new resistance genes, but limited access to the seed has been a bottleneck.”
In addition to assisting government-managed seed producers and 4 seed companies, through the initiative CIMMYT supports 10 farmer unions that purchase, pack, and sell the seed grown by numerous farmer cooperatives, as well as 12 farmer seed production associations, including 5 women’s groups, who profit from growing and selling quality seed of the new varieties.
“The Seed Scaling Initiative gives wheat farmers 25-50 kilograms of wheat seed, based on land availability, to kick-start their seed production operation,” explained Terefe Fitta, manager of the Seed Scaling Initiative. “The farmers pay back the ‘loan’ at harvest with the same amount of seed, which is given to other prospective farmer seed producers, and so on.”
A critical innovation of the initiative has been to link farmer seed producers directly with sources of “early-generation” seed, principally state and federal researchers. “The project has also brought on board laboratories that monitor seed production and test harvested seed, certifying it for marketing,” said Badebo, citing those accomplishments as lasting legacies of the Initiative.
Women seize chance to advance
Recognizing the critical role of women in Ethiopian agriculture and rural communities, the Seed Scaling Initiative is supporting several women’s seed producer groups. An example is the Tembo Awtena Women’s Seed Producers Association, in Angacha District, SNNP.
Established in 2014, Tembo Awtena is the first women’s cooperative in the district. The group first tried to bake and sell bread but reformed in 2015 to produce seed, having heard that it was profitable from other farmer cooperatives.
Through the Seed Scaling Initiative, CIMMYT gave the association around two tons of seed to start and Ethiopia’s Southern Seed Enterprise purchased the entire first year of seed production at a 20 percent premium over market price because the quality was so good, according to Amarech Desta, Tembo Awtena chairwoman.
Amarech Desta (left), Tembo Awtena chairwoman, with fellow farmer and association member Desalech Ashamo. Photo: CIMMYT/A. Habtamu
“In 2016, with support from CIMMYT, we sold more than $7,400 worth of seed,” said Desta, adding that word of the association’s success had attracted 30 additional women farmers in 2017, bringing the total membership to 133.
Desalech Ashamo, an association member who is a single head of household, received nearly $300 for the seed she grew in 2017 and used the earnings to paint her house. “A big advantage is that all our seed is sold in one lot, rather than piecemeal, so we receive a lump sum that can be used for a significant household project.”
Desta explained that, despite Angacha being a very traditional community, men support women’s seed production activities. “My husband knows the benefits are for all and the men even help us with field activities.”
Tembo Awtena members are especially pleased at being one of the three women’s seed production groups in the Oromia and SNNP regions to receive seed threshers recently through the Seed Scaling Initiative. Association members had been threshing the wheat seed manually, a long and laborious process, according to Desta. “With the new machine we will be able thresh in one hour what would take us three days by hand,” she said.
The chairwoman also has plans for an office, a storage area, a milling machine, opening a shop to sell farm supplies, and gaining recognition and publicity to share their story with others who may benefit.
Power from valued partnerships
The success of the Wheat Seed Scaling Initiative depends on the commitment and contributions of diverse national and global partners, among them the Ethiopian Institute of Agricultural Research (EIAR) and state and district level officials in the Amhara, Oromia, SNNP, and Tigray regions, which are home to 90 percent of Ethiopia’s nearly 5 million wheat farmers. Most of the varieties come from breeding lines of CIMMYT and the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA); a number were developed through the Delivering Genetic Gain in Wheat (formerly Durable Rust Resistance in Wheat) project, led by Cornell University and funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the UK’s Department for International Development (DFID) under their UKAid project.
With backing from leading international donors and scientists, nine South Asia wheat researchers recently visited the Americas for training on measures to control a deadly and mysterious South American wheat disease that appeared suddenly on their doorstep in 2016.
Trainees at the CAICO farm in Okinawa, Bolivia. Photo: CIMMYT archives
Known as “wheat blast,” the disease results from a fungus that infects the wheat spikes in the field, turning the grain to inedible chaff. First sighted in Brazil in the mid-1980s, blast has affected up to 3 million hectares in South America and held back the region’s wheat crop expansion for decades.
In 2016, a surprise outbreak in seven districts of Bangladesh blighted wheat harvests on some 15,000 hectares and announced blast’s likely spread throughout South Asia, a region where rice-wheat cropping rotations cover 13 million hectares and nearly a billion inhabitants eat wheat.
“Most commercially grown wheat in South Asia is susceptible to blast,” said Pawan Singh, head of wheat pathology at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT), an organization whose breeding lines are used by public research programs and seed companies in over 100 countries. “The disease poses a grave threat to food and income security in the region and yet is new and unknown to most breeders, pathologists and agronomists there.”
As part of an urgent global response to blast and to acquaint South Asian scientists with techniques to identify and describe the pathogen and help develop resistant varieties, Singh organized a two-week workshop in July. The event drew wheat scientists from Bangladesh, India, Nepal and Mexico, taking them from U.S. greenhouses and labs to fields in Bolivia, where experimental wheat lines are grown under actual blast infections to test for resistance.
The training began at the U.S. Department of Agriculture-Agricultural Research Service (USDA-ARS) Foreign Disease-Weed Science Research facility at Fort Detrick, Maryland, where participants learned about molecular marker diagnosis of the causal fungus Magnaporthe oryzae pathotype triticum (MoT). Sessions also covered greenhouse screening for blast resistance and blast research conducted at Kansas State University. Inside Level-3 Biosafety Containment greenhouses from which no spore can escape, participants observed specialized plant inoculation and disease evaluation practices.
The group then traveled to Bolivia, where researchers have been fighting wheat blast for decades and had valuable experience to share with the colleagues from South Asia.
“In Bolivia, workshop participants performed hands-on disease evaluation and selection in the field—an experience quite distinct from the precise lab and greenhouse practicums,” said Singh, describing the group’s time at the Cooperativa Agropecuaria Integral Colonias Okinawa (CAICO), Bolivia, experiment station.
Other stops in Bolivia included the stations of the Instituto Nacional de Innovación Agropecuaria y Forestal (INIAF), Asociación de Productores de Oleaginosas y Trigo (ANAPO), Centro de Investigación Agrícola Tropical (CIAT), and a blast-screening nursery in Quirusillas operated by INIAF-CIMMYT.
“Scientists in South Asia have little or no experience with blast disease, which mainly attacks the wheat spike and is completely different from the leaf diseases we normally encounter,” said Prem Lal Kashyap, a scientist at the Indian Institute of Wheat and Barley Research (IIWBR) of the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR), who took part in the training. “To score a disease like blast in the field, you need to evaluate each spike and check individual spikelets, which is painstaking and labor-intensive, but only thus can you assess the intensity of disease pressure and identify any plants that potentially carry genes for resistance.”
After the U.S.A. and Bolivia, the South Asia scientists took part in a two-week pathology module of an ongoing advanced wheat improvement course at CIMMYT’s headquarters and research stations in Mexico, covering topics such as the epidemiology and characterization of fungal pathogens and screening for resistance to common wheat diseases.
Gary Peterson (center), explaining wheat blast screening to trainees inside the USDA-ARS Level-3 Biosafety Containment facility. Photo: CIMMYT archives
The knowledge gained will allow participants to refine screening methods in South Asia and maintain communication with the blast experts they met in the Americas, according to Carolina St. Pierre who co-ordinates the precision field-based phenotyping platforms of the CGIAR Research Program on Wheat.
“They can now also raise awareness back home concerning the threat of blast and alert farmers, who may then take preventative and remedial actions,” Singh added. “The Bangladesh Ministry of Agriculture has already formed a task force through the Bangladesh Agricultural Research Council (BARC) to help develop and distribute blast resistant cultivars and pursue integrated agronomic control measures.”
The latest course follows on from a hands-on training course in February 2017 at the Wheat Research Center (WRC) of the Bangladesh Agricultural Research Institute (BARI), Dinajpur, in collaboration with CIMMYT, Cornell University, and Kansas State University.
Participants in the July course received training from a truly international array of instructors, including Kerry Pedley and Gary Peterson, of USDA-ARS, and Christian Cruz, of Kansas State University; Felix Marza, of Bolivia’s Instituto Nacional de Innovación Agropecuaria y Forestal (INIAF); Pawan Singh and Carolina St. Pierre, of CIMMYT; Diego Baldelomar, of ANAPO; and Edgar Guzmán, of CIAT-Bolivia.
Funding for the July event came from the Bangladesh Agricultural Research Institute (BARI), the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR), CIMMYT, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (through the Cereal Systems Initiative for South Asia), the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research (ACIAR), and the CGIAR Research Program on Wheat.
CIUDAD OBREGÓN, Mexico (CIMMYT) — Margaret Krause, a doctoral candidate in plant breeding at Cornell University, became interested in science and nature at an early age. She recalls growing and crossing flowers as a teenager, transferring the pollen from one plant to another as she had learned in biology class.
“I had little exposure to agriculture or how food is produced,” explained Krause. “When I began my undergraduate studies at the University of Minnesota in 2009, I was unsure how these interests would eventually translate into a career.”
Fast-forward to 2017, and Krause is serving as the U.S. Borlaug Fellow in Global Security at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) in the bread wheat breeding program and is one of five recipients of the 2017 Jeanie Borlaug Laube Women in Triticum (WIT) Early Career Award.
“The goal of the award is to provide professional development opportunities and a support network for these women in the future,” said Maricelis Acevedo of the Delivering Genetic Gains in Wheat Project at Cornell University, while presenting the WIT winners during CIMMYT’s Global Wheat Program Visitors’ Week in March.
In the following interview, Krause shares past experiences, her thoughts about the relevance of the award for future generations and her own career direction.
Q: When did you first become interested in agriculture?
A few weeks into my first semester of undergrad, University of Minnesota alumnus and Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, Norman Borlaug, passed away. Interested in learning more about his contributions, I attended a memorial ceremony on campus. I was inspired by Dr. Borlaug’s work to improve crops around the world and I began to realize that the field of plant breeding combined my interest in science and the natural world with my desire to improve livelihoods and the environment on a global scale.
Around the same time, I was looking for a part-time job on campus and, coincidentally, the wheat breeding lab was hiring an undergraduate laboratory assistant. Despite my lack of experience, I was hired. I got my start in this world assisting graduate students in the lab, greenhouse and field with wheat breeding and genetics experiments and since then I’ve never looked back.
Q: Tell us about the steps that led you here.
I graduated from the University of Minnesota in 2014 with a bachelor’s in applied plant science. As an undergraduate, I researched the genetic mechanisms that govern the plant’s response to fungal diseases in both wheat and barley. I also participated in two summer internships with Monsanto and DuPont Pioneer.
As a doctoral candidate in plant breeding at Cornell, my research interests focus on integrating new phenotyping, genotyping and environmental-sensing techniques to develop new wheat varieties for a range of environmental conditions. I’m currently working with CIMMYT conducting my dissertation research with the Global Wheat Program.
Q: What does receiving theWomen in Triticum award mean to you?
It’s an honor to join this international community of women who have also focused their careers around improving livelihoods worldwide by delivering higher-yielding, nutritious and climate-resilient crop varieties. I’m most excited about the opportunity to be joining this network so that we may support one another and learn from each other, as we grow in our careers.
Q: Why is it important to have such a community of women?
There is a plethora of research documenting the importance of including women in the scientific process, but female agricultural scientists continue to face challenges and inequalities when entering the workforce.
Female scientists bring a variety of experiences and viewpoints that may benefit scientific advancement and improve the situation for other women, but studies have shown that they can encounter difficulties in accessing funding, seeking promotions or participating in conferences. Most shocking is that these challenges exist for female scientists in developing and developed countries alike.
Q: What are you currently working on with CIMMYT?
I will be spending a total of two years at CIMMYT, working with the Global Wheat Program to develop new strategies for breeding wheat varieties adapted to different environments. We are interested in integrating advanced genotyping technologies, high-throughput phenotyping techniques and environmental information into prediction models for crop performance. The goal is to more quickly and efficiently develop new, climate-resilient wheat varieties that are tailored to perform well under different environmental conditions.
Currently I’m located at the Campo Experimental Norman E. Borlaug in Ciudad Obregón, Mexico. This past season I worked with CIMMYT’s Bread Wheat Breeding and Wheat Physiology Programs to operate small unmanned aerial vehicles equipped with cameras and sensors in the field. These tools allow us to track each wheat variety’s growth and development throughout the season; the response to stress and the data acquired will be used to improve the efficiency of selection.
Q: Where do you see yourself in 10 years?
I envision myself pursuing a career in agricultural research with the primary focus being global development. I would love to be involved in collaborative research projects aimed at developing climate resilience in agricultural production, improving the nutritional quality of food systems, or addressing the agricultural needs of marginalized communities.
I also hope to continue mentoring students interested in plant sciences and to become more active in educating broader audiences about agriculture through science communications platforms.
Breaking Ground is a regular series featuring staff at CIMMYT
EL BATAN, Mexico (CIMMYT) – David Guerena is fascinated by what he learns from smallholder farmers about the interactions between agriculture and the environment.
Guerena’s work involves the strategic planning and execution of multidisciplinary spatial agronomy programs across complex ecologies. In addition to strict biophysical work, which involves integrating chemistry, biology, and physics into agricultural systems, he also engages in socio-economic and market facilitation dynamics research.
“Humanity has been eking out a cultivated living from the earth for around 10,000 years,” Guerena said. “Smallholder farmers are the direct link to this collective knowledge, which has shaped and defined human history. I really enjoy witnessing farmers reap satisfying harvests from their own efforts, but via outputs from agronomic systems research of which I have been a part.”
“Agriculture is intensely satisfying. A seed, fertile soil, water and sunshine eventually turn into food. This is such a simple process, yet millions of people around the world don’t get enough to eat. I draw inspiration from being a part of positively changing this dynamic.”
Originally from Santa Barbara, California, Guerena has always been fascinated by the natural sciences and international travel. He decided to pursue a career in international agriculture by obtaining his Ph.D. from Cornell University, specializing in crop and soil science. Prior to joining CIMMYT, he worked as a soil scientist and agriculture innovations manager at One Acre Fund, served as an international research fellow with the World Agroforestry Center and a Borlaug Fellow in international food security.
CIMMYT provided a unique opportunity for Guerena to work on global food systems. “Together, maize and wheat make up a significant proportion of the global food supply – maize and wheat research is a globally important mandate,” he said. “CIMMYT has also left an indelible mark on human history through facilitating the Green Revolution.”
Currently, Guerena is working on spatial agronomy programs, focusing on questions such as how to move from blanketed to site-specific agronomic recommendations across complex agro-ecologies in the developing world. Guerena will also investigate how digital technologies like SMS, smartphones, image recognition, and remote sensing data can be used and integrated into agronomy programming for smallholder farmers living in poverty.
Precision agronomy, a farming management concept based on observing, measuring, and responding to inter- and intra-field variability in crops, is already transforming agricultural efficiency in the developed world, but these advancements have not yet reached the developing world.
This is of the utmost importance, as worldwide, the vast majority of farmers are smallholders producing most of the global food supply. CIMMYT is not only looking at ways to put its top-level science into the hands of farmers, but also at ways to use these technologies to turn farmers themselves into world-class agronomists. This approach may be a way to bypass cumbersome agricultural knowledge generation and dissemination systems and reach farmers directly, at scale.
Breaking Ground is a regular series featuring staff at CIMMYT
EL BATAN (CIMMYT) — Xuecai Zhang wants to merge traditional maize breeding methods with new software and other tools to help improve farmers’ yields faster than ever.
“In the next three decades we need to increase agricultural production by 70 percent to meet projected food demand,” said Zhang, a maize genomic selection breeder at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT). “However, crop yields, while improving, are not increasing quickly enough to meet this challenge. We must explore new methods and technologies that can speed up our crop breeding processes if we hope to feed a world with over 2.3 billion more people by 2050.”
Growing up in Henan province, China, Zhang’s mother was a teacher who instilled a love of science in him from a young age.
“I loved exploring outside and seeing how plants grew — I always wanted to know how they worked,” said Zhang. “Maize was naturally interesting to me because it’s the second most grown crop in Henan, and is becoming a very important crop in China overall.”
Zhang first arrived at CIMMYT in 2009 while completing a doctorate in applied quantitative genetics. He subsequently returned as a postdoctoral fellow in 2011 to undertake molecular breeding and coordinate CIMMYT’s maize genomic selection program.
Since his return, he has focused mainly on helping breeders and statisticians work together to create new tools that can help accelerate the breeding process through genomic selection.
“It’s crucial that as breeders, we’re able to use genomic selection in our work,” Zhang said. “Not only does it speed up the breeding process to deliver better, faster results to farmers in the field, applied well it’s also a more cost-effective option.”
Conventional plant breeding is dependent on a researcher going into the field, observing the characteristics of a plant based on how its genotype interacts with the environment, then painstakingly selecting and combining those materials that show such favorable traits such as high yield or drought resistance. This process is repeated again and again to develop new varieties.
Genomic selection adds DNA markers to the breeder’s toolkit. After initial field evaluation breeders are able to use DNA markers and advanced computing applications to select the best plants and predict the best combinations of plants without having to wait to evaluate every generation in the field. This speeds up the development of new varieties as more cycles of selection and recombination can be conducted in a year compared with field selection alone.
The cost of hiring a human to go and collect phenotypic data for conventional breeding is increasing, while conversely the costs associated with genomic selection are getting lower as genotyping and computing technology becomes more affordable, according to Zhang.
“Breeders need to think about where the technology is pushing our field,” he said. “They will increasingly have to be versed statisticians and computer scientists to effectively apply genomic selection to their work, and I want to help ensure they have the skills and tools to make the most of the technology.”
Zhang has helped demonstrate to breeders in Latin America, Africa and Asia of the value of genomic selection by showing that the technique can improve the prediction accuracy of successful varieties in comparison to conventional breeding. He also credits joint efforts like the GOBII project, a large-scale public-sector effort supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, to apply genomic selection techniques to crop breeding programs across the developing world, as key towards curating the necessary data for genomic breeding programs.
“In the future, I hope to continue to help build better tools for breeders to move towards genomic selection,” Zhang said. “I chose to breed maize because of the potential impact it has to help smallholder farmers globally. Compared with other crops the yield potential of maize is very high, so I want to ensure we are using the best resources available that will help maize reach its full potential.”
Bleached spikes infected with wheat blast hold shriveled grain, if any. Photo: E. Duveiller/CIMMYT
DINAJPUR, Bangladesh (CIMMYT) — Responding to a 2016 outbreak of the deadly and little-understood crop disease “wheat blast” in Bangladesh, 40 wheat pathologists, breeders and agronomists from Bangladesh, India and Nepal have gathered to hone their skills through surveillance exercises in farmers’ fields and molecular analysis of the causal fungus in laboratories of the Bangladesh Agricultural Research Institute (BARI) at Gazipur.
Entitled “Taking action to mitigate the threat of wheat blast in South Asia: Disease surveillance and monitoring skills training,” the 13-day program was launched on 4 February at BARI’s Wheat Research Center (WRC), Bangladesh Agriculture Research Institute (BARI), Dinajpur, in collaboration with the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT), the CGIAR research program on wheat, the Delivering Genetic Gain in Wheat (DGGW) project led by Cornell University, and Kansas State University (KSU).
The 2016 Bangladesh outbreak was the first time wheat blast has appeared in South Asia. The disease struck 15,000 hectares in 7 southwestern and southern districts of Bangladesh, with crop losses averaging 25-30 percent and reaching 100 percent in some cases.
In response the Bangladesh Ministry of Agriculture formed a task force through the Bangladesh Agricultural Research Council (BARC) to help develop and distribute resistant cultivars and pursue integrated agronomic control measures. A factsheet distributed to wheat farmers is raising awareness about the disease and particularly its identification and management.
Caused by the fungus Magnaporthe oryzae pathotype Triticum (MoT) and first discovered in Paraná State, Brazil, in the mid-1980s, wheat blast constitutes a major constraint to wheat production in South America. The sudden appearance of a highly virulent MoT strain in Bangladesh presents a serious threat for food and income security in South Asia, home to 300 million undernourished people and whose inhabitants consume over 100 million tons of wheat each year.
Experts from CIMMYT, Cornell University and Kansas State University, along with scientists from BARI and Bangladesh Agricultural University (BAU), are serving as instructors and facilitators.
“This training will increase the capacity of Bangladesh and neighboring country scientists, thereby strengthening research on wheat blast and monitoring disease through intensive surveillance,” said the Additional Secretary (Research), Ministry of Agriculture Md. Fazle Wahid Khondaker, chief guest in the inaugural session. Arun K. Joshi, CIMMYT-India country representative, T.P. Tiwari, CIMMYT-Bangladesh country representative, Prof. Dr. Bahadur Meah from BAU, Mymensingh, and Additional Director, Department of Agricultural Extension, and Md. Julfikar Haider were present as special guests. Dr. N.C.D. Barma, WRC, BARI chaired the session, and BARI Director General Dr. Abul Kalam Azad took part.
The training program is funded by BARI, CIMMYT, DGGW, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation through the CIMMYT-led Cereal Systems Initiative for South Asia (CSISA) and CSISA- Mechanization projects, as well as the Australian Center for International Agricultural Research (ACIAR). The DGGW project is funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the United Kingdom’s Department for International Development (DFID) through UK Aid.
Participants with guests during training inauguration. Photo: S. Khan/CIMMYT
David Hodson, senior scientist with CIMMYT, trains South Asian wheat scientists on the use of handheld surveillance and monitoring devices. Hodson directs the rusttracker.org global wheat rust monitoring system for the Delivering Genetic Gain in Wheat (DGGW) project. Credit: CORNELL/Linda McCandless
EL BATAN, Mexico (CIMMYT) – Scientists are concerned over the proliferation of highly virulent fungal wheat diseases, including two new races of yellow rust – one in Europe and North Africa, the other taking hold in East Africa and Central Asia – and a new race of stem rust emerging in Europe.
The collaborative Global Rust Reference Center (GRRC) hosted by Aarhus University in Denmark and including the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) and the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA), was instrumental in identifying the new races of yellow and stem rust.
A strategic tool developed by David Hodson, a senior scientist with CIMMYT plays a key role in monitoring the movement of wheat-rust pathogens, helping farmers combat the disease in time to save crops and prevent food insecurity.
“We see an alarming increase in severe disease, more disease diversity and rapid spread,” said Hodson, who invented the Rust Tracker field surveillance tool.
Last year, the Italian island of Sicily was badly hit by a strain of wheat stem rust – an event not seen in Europe since the 1950s, following concerted efforts by wheat breeders to eliminate it.
Stem rust appears as a reddish-brown fungal build-up on wheat stems or leaves, stunting and weakening plants, preventing kernels from forming, leading to shriveled grain and potential crop losses of 50 to 100 percent.
Dispersal modeling, undertaken by the University of Cambridge and the UK Met Office, which forecasts weather and climate change, indicates that spores from the Sicilian outbreak could potentially have spread within the Mediterranean wheat growing region, but scientists are unsure whether they will successfully over-winter, surviving and proliferating, according to a recent story in the journal Nature.
EARLY WARNING
“Several factors may be influencing the changes and rapid spread: increased travel and trade; increasing pathogen populations; more uniform cropping systems and also climate change, but the rapid changes we are observing highlight the need for an enhanced early-warning system,” said Hodson, a member of an international team of scientists collaborating under the Delivering Genetic Gain in Wheat (DGGW) project administered by Cornell University through the Borlaug Global Rust Initiative (BGRI).
Scientists engaged with the major four-year international project – which has a budget of $34.5 million due to grants equalling $24 million from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and a recent $10.5 million grant from UK Aid (Britain’s Department for International Development, or DFID) – use comparative genomics and big data to develop new wheat varieties. The aim is to help governments provide smallholder farmers in the developing world with seeds incorporating resilience to environmental stresses and diseases through local entrepreneurial distributors.
“The sooner farmers are notified of a potential rust outbreak, the better chance they have to save their crops through fungicides or by planting resilient wheat varieties,” Hodson said.
“It’s a constant challenge. We’re always on the lookout for new diseases and variants on old diseases to put the wheels in motion to aid governments who can distribute seeds bred specifically to outsmart rusts.”
However, the long-term sustainability of these vital disease-monitoring systems is uncertain. Despite the significant investments, challenges remain, Hodson said.
“It’s worrying that just as stem rust is re-appearing in Europe we’re at risk of losing the only stem rust pathotyping capacity in Europe at GRRC, due to a funding shortfall. Given the threats and changes we are observing, there really is a critical need for a long-term strategy to address major crop diseases.”
TRACKER ORIGINS
The online Rust Tracker was originally conceived as a tool to battle stem rust, including the lethal Ug99 race, which since its discovery in 1998 has spread from Uganda into the Middle East and is now found in 13 countries. If Ug99 takes hold in a field it can completely wipe out a farmer’s crop. In developing countries, farmers have more difficulty accessing and affording fungicides, which can potentially save a crop.
Under the Durable Rust Resistance in Wheat project, the predecessor to the DGGW project, BGRI-affiliated scientists aimed to prevent the spread of Ug99 into the major global breadbaskets of China and India. So far, they have succeeded in keeping it in check and raising awareness among governments and farmers of its potentially devastating impact.
“Researchers and farmers are connected in the global village,” Hodson said. “Plant pathogens know no borders. We must leave no stone unturned in our efforts to understand the dynamics of wheat rusts, how they’re changing, where they’re spreading and why. If wheat scientists can help prevent a food crisis, we’re doing our job to help maintain political and economic stability in the world.”
EL BATAN, Mexico (CIMMYT) – Scientists have unlocked evolutionary secrets of landraces through an unprecedented study of allelic diversity, revealing more about the genetic basis of flowering time and how maize adapts to variable environments, according to new research published in Nature Genetics journal. The discovery opens up opportunities to explore and use landrace diversity in new ways to help breeders adapt crops to climate change and other emerging challenges to crop production.
Farmers worldwide have been ingeniously adapting landrace maize varieties to their local environments for thousands of years. In this landmark study, over 4,000 landraces from across the Americas were analyzed and their DNA characterized using recent advances in genomics.
A unique experimental strategy was developed to study and learn more about the genes underlying maize adaptation by researchers with the MasAgro Biodiversidad program and the Seeds of Discovery (SeeD) initiative.
Significantly, the study identified 100 genes, among the 40,000 that make up the maize genome, influencing adaptation to latitude, altitude, growing season and the point at which maize plants flower in the field.
Flowering time helps plants adapt to different environments. It is measured as the period between planting and the emergence of flowers, and is a basic mechanism through which plants integrate environmental information to balance when to make seeds instead of more leaves. The seeds form the next generation making flowering time a critically important feature in a plant’s life cycle.
Over the next century, increasingly erratic weather patterns and environmental changes projected to result from climate change mean that such crops as maize will need to adapt at an unprecedented rate to maintain stable production globally.
“This research offers a blueprint of how we can rapidly assess genetic resources for a highly variable crop species like maize, and identify, in landraces, those elements of the maize genome which may benefit breeders and farmers,” said molecular geneticist Sarah Hearne, who leads maize research within MAB/SeeD, a collaboration led by the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) with strong scientific partnerships with Mexico’s research institute for agriculture, livestock and forests (INIFAP), the Antonio Narro Autonomous Agrarian University (UAAAN) in Mexico and Cornell University in the United States.
“This is the most extensive study, in terms of diversity, that has been conducted on maize flowering,” said Martha Willcox, maize landrace improvement coordinator at CIMMYT . “This was achieved using landraces, the evaluation of which is an extremely difficult and complex task.”
The groundbreaking study was supported by Mexico’s Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock, Rural Development, Fisheries and Food (SAGARPA) through the Sustainable Modernization of Traditional Agriculture (MasAgro) initiative. Additional support from the U.S. Department of Agriculture – Agricultural Research Service, Cornell University and the National Science Foundation facilitated the completion of vast quantities of data analysis.
“The knowledge we have gained from this work gives us something similar to a manual of ‘how to go on a successful treasure hunt;’ within the extensive genetic diversity that exists for maize. This knowledge can accelerate and broaden our work on developing resilient varieties, building upon millennia of natural and farmer selection in landraces,” Hearne said.
CORRECT CITATION:
Romero-Navarro, J. A., Willcox, M., Burgueño, J. Romay M. Swarts, K., Trachsel, S., Preciado, E., Terron, A., Vallejo Delgado, H., Vidal, V., Ortega, A., Espinoza Banda, A., Gómez Montiel, N.O., Ortiz-Monasterio, I., San Vicente, F., Guadarrama Espinoza, A., Atlin, G., Wenzl, P., Hearne, S.*, Buckler, E*. A study of allelic diversity underlying flowering time adaptation in maize landraces. Nature Genetics. http://www.nature.com/ng/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/ng.3784.html
*Corresponding authors
David Hodson, CIMMYT senior scientist (L), describes the challenges posed by wheat rust to Priti Patel, Britain’s international development secretary, during the Grand Challenges Annual Meeting in London. DFID/handout
LONDON (CIMMYT) – International wheat rust monitoring efforts are not only keeping the fast-spreading disease in check, but are now being deployed to manage risks posed by other crop diseases, said a scientist attending a major scientific event in London.
Although initially focused on highly virulent Ug99 stem rust, the rust tracking system – developed as part of the Borlaug Global Rust Initiative, an international collaboration involving Cornell University and national agricultural research programs – is also used to monitor other fungal rusts and develop prediction models with the aim of helping to curtail their spread.
“Our data reinforce the fact that we face threats from rusts per se and not just from the Ug99 race group – we are fortunate that international efforts laid the groundwork to establish a comprehensive monitoring system,” said Hodson, one of more than 1,200 international scientists at the gathering.
“The research investments are having additional benefits,” he told Priti Patel, Britain’s secretary of state for international development, explaining that the wheat rust surveillance system is now also being applied to the deadly Maize Lethal Necrosis disease in Africa.
“The learning from stem rust and investments in data management systems and other components of the tracking system have allowed us to fast-track a similar surveillance system for another crop and pathosystem.”
“Researchers at the University of Cambridge are working with the UK Met Office and international scientists to track and prevent deadly outbreaks of wheat rust which can decimate this important food crop for many of the world’s poorest people,” Patel said, referring to collaborative projects involving CIMMYT, funded by the Gates Foundation and DFID
Patel also launched a DFID research review at the meeting, committing the international development agency to continued research support and detailing how the UK intends to deploy development research and innovation funding of £390 million ($485 million) a year over the next four years.
Wheat improvement work by the CGIAR consortium of agricultural researchers was highlighted in the research review as an example of high impact DFID research. Wheat improvement has resulted in economic benefits of $2.2 to $3.1 billion per year and almost half of all the wheat planted in developing countries.
