Safeguarding wheat yields from cereal fungal invaders - Professor Diane Saunders, John Innes Centre🌾
Wheat rusts are known as the “polio of agriculture” and pose a threat to wheat production worldwide. Despite long-standing efforts by a global community to wrestle the wheat rusts into submission, new strains are constantly evolving that can overcome the barriers we create to inhibit infection; and once again, leave the world’s wheat crops vulnerable. To tackle these re-emergent threats, Diane’s lab uses an integrated genomics-based approach to enhance the resilience of our wheat production system:
"Our rapid “field pathogenomics” strategy, using transcriptome sequencing of infected wheat leaves taken directly from the field, has enabled us to gain insight into the population structure of the wheat rusts and monitor their evolving threat to wheat production. This approach also generates insight into the plant genes that are highly expressed during a successful infection, which may have functions that support pathogen colonisation. Disrupting the function of several of these genes has shown that their function is essential for supporting wheat rust infection, presenting these genes as new potential targets for manipulation in wheat rust resistance breeding. Building on the success of our “field pathogenomics” strategy, we also recently developed an award-winning Mobile And Real-time PLant disEase (MARPLE) diagnostics platform that has reduced the duration of strain-level diagnostics from many months using traditional approaches to just 48 hours. This new methodology has been deployed across parts of Europe, Asia and Africa and has the potential to revolutionise plant disease diagnostics, changing how plant health threats are identified and tracked into the future."
Speaker profile:
Professor Diane Saunders is a Group Leader at the John Innes Centre leading research into (re-)emerging plant pathogens that pose a significant threat to agriculture. She is well known for her breadth of expertise in plant pathology, from field studies, basic plant pathology, cell biology, biochemistry and molecular biology to bioinformatics and population genetics. She has applied these skills to study three of the world’s most important plant diseases: rice blast, potato late blight and cereal rusts, making many notable contributions. These include recent work identifying and evaluating re-emergence of stem rust in the UK and development and application of pioneering techniques in pathogen surveillance; the revolutionary “field pathogenomics” and “MARPLE diagnostics” techniques, for which she was awarded the BBSRC Innovator of the Year award in the International Category (2019).
She also works closely with industry, including breeders, ag-chem and agronomy companies to ensure implications of her research discoveries are rapidly progressed to practical solutions for agriculture. In addition, her receipt of the Royal Society Rosalind Franklin Award in 2022 reflects her excellent track-record of mentoring early-career researchers and advocacy work promoting gender parity in wheat research.
For more information, visit:
www.jic.ac.uk/people/diane-sa...
Filmed at the Gatsby Plant Science Summer School, 2023.
#plantpathogens #wheatrust #agriculture