Location: Cereal Disease Lab
Project Number: 5062-21220-024-010-S
Project Type: Non-Assistance Cooperative Agreement
Start Date: Mar 1, 2024
End Date: Jul 31, 2024
Objective:
1) Assessment of Ethiopian breeding lines and US-resistant germplasm against Ethiopian and Kenyan isolates; 2) Inform disease-control strategies through virulence screening of FHB pathogens.
Approach:
The overarching project approach is to sample broadly across FHB-associated pathogens in Ethiopia and to identify the virulence of these samples across available Ethiopian germplasm and known resistant lines from the United States. Ultimately this strategy will help identify which pathogens pose the biggest threat to agriculture in Eastern Africa while also clarifying which plant lines are most promising for resistance to the disease.
Pathogens isolated from Eastern Africa and isolates of known virulence from existing culture collections will be screened against a representative panel of Ethiopian lines and U.S. lines with known resistance to establish if there is existing resistance in the Ethiopian breeding program and if resistance in U.S. lines holds up to the pathogens of Ethiopia. Pathogen virulence will also be assessed on wheat lines using high-throughput methodology that can simultaneously identify host resistance and pathogen virulence associated with the recent outbreaks.
