Yahoo News 21 Feb 09;
WASHINGTON (AFP) – An international research team has discovered a gene to make wheat resistance to a fungal disease responsible for millions of (acres) hectares of lost crops worldwide, according to a study published Thursday.
"This is the first step to achieving more durable resistance to a devastating disease in wheat," said Cristobal Uauy, co-author of the report, which was lead by researchers in Great Britain, United States and Israel.
Researchers had previously engineered wheat strains to be resistant against "stripe rust" disease, but it has enjoyed limited durability in practice because the fungus Puccinia striiformis had always "mutated to overcome them," according to the study authors.
But the new gene found in wild wheat overcomes this problem, said researchers, whose work is published in the US journal Science.
"This gene makes wheat more resistant to all stripe rust fungus races tested so far," said Uauy, who works at the John Innes Centre in Norwich, England.
Common wheat provides some 20 percent of the calories eaten by all of humanity, said the study authors.
