US: New oat ready for active duty against crown rust disease

A team of Agricultural Research Service (ARS) and university scientists has released two new oat germplasm lines to shore up the cereal crop’s defenses against its most devastating fungal disease, known as “crown rust.” The team specifically created the oat lines so that they can be crossed with elite commercial varieties to fortify them with new genetic sources of resistance to crown rust, which is caused by the fungus Puccinia coronata f. sp. avenae. Crown rust is a plague of oat worldwide and can inflict grain yield losses of up to 50 percent in unprotected crops. The team announced its development of the resistant oat germplasm lines—dubbed CDL-111 and CDL-167—in the May 2024 issue of the Journal of Plant Registration, culminating more than 25 years of germplasm screening, plant genetic mapping, selective breeding and evaluation in greenhouse and field trials. “Currently, the majority of the oat varieties with rust resistance carry a gene or two for resistance (often referred ...