Saudi Arabia: Understanding rust resistance in bread wheat

Pests and diseases result in the loss of one-fifth of the global wheat harvest each year, which is enough to make around 290 billion loaves of bread. Resolving the persistent problem of the fungal rust diseases that attack wheat could help ensure future food security. KAUST researchers, along with collaborators from South Africa, France and the U.S., have assembled the highest quality genome to date for bread wheat. This is a key South African wheat cultivar called Kariega, which has robust resistance to stripe rust, one of the three species of wheat rust. Using this genome, the researchers identified and cloned a key gene that confers stripe rust resistance."Rust spores are dispersed by winds and can travel thousands of kilometers, meaning new and highly virulent ...