1. 'Super wheat' resists devastating rust
2. Scientists: 'Super' Wheat to Boost Food Security

NOTE: A new non-GM superwheat has been developed that resists the rust disease that's ravaging crops in the Middle East and Africa.
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1. 'Super wheat' resists devastating rust
Naomi Antony
SciDev.net
17 June 2011
http://www.scidev.net/en/news/-super-wheat-resists-devastating-rust.html

'Super varieties' of wheat resistant to the deadly stem rust fungus Ug99 could replace wheat in affected areas in as little as two years -- if farmers can be persuaded to adopt them, according to a wheat rust expert.

First discovered in Uganda some 13 years ago, Ug99 is increasingly virulent. It is spreading throughout East and Southern Africa, and spores have also reached as far afield as Iran and Yemen. Wheat breeders had been working on promising resistant varieties in Njoro, Kenya, in the hopes that one of them could combat the fungus.

Now they have bred new varieties with good resistance and with up to 15 per cent better yields than today's varieties, said Ronnie Coffman, head of the Durable Rust Resistance in Wheat Project at Cornell University, United States.

Stem rust, also known as black rust, is even more damaging than stripe (or yellow) rust which has wiped out about 40 per cent of harvests in Central Asia, the Middle East and North Africa.

The new varieties, developed by wheat breeding expert Ravi Singh and colleagues at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) in Mexico, are resistant to both rusts. They were unveiled at the 2011 Borlaug Global Rust Initiative's Technical Workshop in Minneapolis, United States, this week (13 16 June).

The varieties were developed by combining several plant resistance genes, which individually give low levels of resistance but when found together in the same plant make it more difficult for the Ug99 pathogen to unravel their combined defences, providing better resistance.

"We're trying to raise awareness of these materials and convince farmers that they should adopt them before [wheat rust] grows endemic ”” especially in countries such as Ethiopia," said Coffman.

Coffman said that the two most critical countries to tackle are Ethiopia and Yemen. However, as Yemen's political unrest has impeded anti-wheat rust efforts ”” material recently sent to the country by CIMMYT perished in customs -- breeders are initially focusing their efforts on Ethiopia.

"We believe that farmers in Ethiopia will accept the new varieties," he said. "There is a major outbreak of yellow rust (stripe rust) there. It is not nearly as devastating as stem rust, but it's significant and farmers want something resistant to it.

"These new varieties are resistant to both rusts so we're hopeful that the incidence of yellow rust will cause them to accept the new varieties. Unless farmers have an incentive that they can see, they don't tend to accept new varieties."

He said that if the incentive works, the whole of Ethiopia could be growing resistant strains in just two years -- and this same timetable could apply to the entire East African region. "But it's a big if," he added.

Singh said: "We need to see national governments making the investments in seed systems development, including seed production and distribution. In many areas there will need to be support and leadership from wealthy countries and international institutions to carry these innovations into farmers' fields."
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2. Scientists: 'Super' Wheat to Boost Food Security
By STEVE KARNOWSKI Associated Press
MINNEAPOLIS June 10, 2011 (AP)
ABC News
http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=13806633

Scientists say they're close to producing new "super varieties" of wheat that will resist a virulent fungus while boosting yields up to 15 percent, potentially easing a deadly threat to the world's food supply.

The research is part of a global drive to protect wheat crops from the Ug99 strain of stem rust. It will be presented next week at a conference in St. Paul that's part of the Borlaug Global Rust Initiative, based at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., organizers said Thursday.

Scientists will also report that Ug99 variants are becoming increasingly virulent and are being carried by the winds beyond Uganda and other East African countries where they were first identified in 1999. Once infected with the deadly fungus, wheat plants become covered in reddish-brown blisters.

According to a news release issued by the initiative ahead of the symposium, the fungus has now spread across all of eastern and southern Africa, and it might just be a matter of time before it reaches India or Pakistan, and even Australia and the Americas.

"We are facing the prospect of a biological firestorm, but it's also clear that the research community has responded to the threat at top speed, and we are getting results in the form of new varieties that are resistant to rust and appealing to farmers," Ronnie Coffman, who heads the Durable Rust Resistance in Wheat project at Cornell, said in the release.

Researchers will report at the conference that new varieties of wheat under development at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center in Mexico show resistance to all three kinds of wheat rust -- stem rust including Ug99, yellow rust and leaf rust -- the release said. Some of those varieties also boost yields 10 to 15 percent, it said.

But significant obstacles must be overcome before the resistant new varieties of wheat can replace the susceptible varieties that make up as much as 90 percent of the wheat now in production, the researchers acknowledged. They called for more investments by wealthy countries and international institutions to continue developing the varieties, to help them keep them effective against diseases that continue to evolve, and to develop the seed production and distribution infrastructure needed to put the new varieties in the hands of poor farmers in developing countries.

The new strains mark a huge advance, said Marty Carson, research director at the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Cereal Research Laboratory at the University of Minnesota in St. Paul.

"Anytime you can talk about a 15 percent boost in yields from existing varieties, I mean that's phenomenal. And to get combined resistance to all three rusts, that's also a very big deal," said Carson, who wasn't directly involved in that research. His lab, which is heavily involved in the fight against Ug99, is hosting the conference along with the University of Minnesota.

Carson pointed out in an interview that wheat farmers in the developing world that the Mexican institute known by its Spanish acronym CIMMYT is targeting with these new varieties don't have many other options, such as fungicides, for dealing with threats such as rust. And while he was skeptical about the 15 percent claim, he said even a lower yield increase would be a major accomplishment.

The Borlaug Global Rust Initiative was launched five years ago by the late Nobel Peace Prize winner Norman Borlaug in response to the Ug99 threat. Borlaug, an alumnus of the University of Minnesota, was a leader of CIMMYT. His research sparked the "Green Revolution" of the 1960s that transformed agriculture through high-yield, disease-resistant crops and other innovations, helping to more than double world food production by 1990. He's credited with saving perhaps 1 billion people from starvation.

Ravi Singh, a wheat breeder at CIMMYT, helped lead the research on the new strains, which he'll present at the conference and publish later this year in the Annual Review of Phytopathology. He said in an interview that the new varieties were developed through conventional crossbreeding, not genetic engineering. They have been tested successfully for disease resistance in Kenya and Ethiopia, where Ug99 is endemic, as well as at the USDA lab in St. Paul.

Donor-funded CIMMYT distributes its seed for free to keep it affordable, Singh said, and the new varieties will be planted in several countries for yield trials in the coming growing season in hopes they can enter widespread use in a few years.