Major threat to wheat

[wolfhnd]

Agricultural Research Service (ARS) scientists have solved a longstanding mystery as to why a pathogen that threatens the world's wheat supply can be so adaptable, diverse and virulent. It is because the fungus that causes the wheat disease called stripe rust may use sexual recombination to adapt to resistant varieties of wheat.

ARS plant pathologist Yue Jin and his colleagues Les Szabo and Marty Carson at the agency's Cereal Disease Laboratory at St. Paul, Minn., have shown for the first time that stripe rust, caused by Puccinia striiformis, is capable of sexually reproducing on the leaves of an alternate host called barberry, a common ornamental. The fungus also goes through asexual mutation. But sexual recombination offers an advantage because it promotes rapid reshuffling of virulence gene combinations and produces a genetic mix more likely to pass along traits that improve the chances for survival.

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/ ... 060110.php

[Marshall]

Here is the article by those three people
http://apsjournals.apsnet.org/doi/abs/1 ... 100-5-0432

Nonsubscribers can at least see the abstract.

Here is an article in Science Daily longer than the Eurekalert short release.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/20 ... 151112.htm

It's interesting. Sexual reproduction makes a pathogen much more dangerous.
There is a theory that we animals developed sexual reproduction after we started being preyed upon by parasites. With sex, we could outrace the parasites, evolve resistence to them faster than they could evolve and catch up with us. Whole thing very interesting. Thanks

Here is a gene that confers resistance to stripe rust, however that was last year and by now the sexy fungus may have evolved some way to get around the resistance conferred by the gene:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/20 ... 183417.htm