Scientists have made African rice resistant to all variations of bacterial leaf blight

This was announced on Tuesday by the press service of the German University of Dusseldorf (HHU). "We modified the genome of Kombok, a popular East African rice variety, to protect it from bacterial pathogens. The new rice variety is resistant to all known African and Asian forms of bacterial leaf blight. These include those varieties of the disease that have recently been discovered in Tanzania," said HHU professor Wolf Frommer, quoted by the university's press service. The so-called bacterial leaf blight is one of the most dangerous diseases of cereals, which mainly affects cultivated rice. It is caused by microbes of the species Xanthomonas oryzae, which are able to spread rapidly from grass to grass through groundwater. Initially, severe forms of this disease affected only Asian varieties of rice, but in 2019, agronomists first discovered Asian strains of the microbe in Tanzania, in the east of the African continent. The penetration of Asian varieties of Xanthomonas oryzae into ...