A recent CIMMYT Newsletter carried an account of progress against Ug99 as shown below.

Many international wheat varieties owed their resistance to a single gene Sr31. Over the decades in East Africa the stem rust fungus evolved a way around this gene, resulting in Ug99, to which much of the world’s wheat was susceptible. Ug99 is now present in various Eastern and Southern Africa countries, as well as Sudan, Yemen, and Iran. Seven different variants belonging to the Ug99 lineage have now been identified, some of which are able to defeat the resistance genes, Sr24 and Sr36.

Protecting the world from Ug99 will prevent devastating crop losses and hunger for the poor. An international research effort is now supplying new wheat varieties that are resistant to Ug99—both for African countries where outbreaks already occur and wheat farming regions that lie in the disease’s path.

Kenya was the first country to be attacked by Ug99 after its emergence in Uganda was confirmed in 1999. There have been several epidemics, as most of the varieties planted in Kenya were susceptible and wheat is grown continuously throughout the year, so more mature crops can infect younger plants. However, the presence of Ug99 in Kenya has been turned into an opportunity that is benefitting the world, thanks to a close partnership between the Kenya Agricultural Research Institute (KARI), the international Borlaug Global Rust Initiative (BGRI) and CIMMYT. Each year, KARI’s Njoro field station now tests as many as 50,000 wheat lines, from research organizations and national breeding programs of more than 25 countries. As a consequence, resistant wheat varieties are now available to farmers in several countries, with more due for release in 2012.

Farmers in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Egypt, Nepal, and Pakistan are multiplying the new seed. In an emergency, the resistant wheat harvest could be used as seed, allowing complete replacement of susceptible varieties within a year should Ug99 appear.

Scientists continue to release new and even better-yielding varieties to enhance productivity and genetic diversity. Breeders are working hard to make sure they do not rely on one gene. Instead they are using harder-to-spot “slow-rusting” genes, which confer a type of “adult plant resistance” that cannot be easily evaluated in seedlings in the greenhouse, but must instead be evaluated in adult plants in the field. Individually, the effects of slow rusting genes are minor, slowing down the disease rather than bestowing total resistance. However, four or five such genes together can result in near immunity. This additive resistance is much less likely to be hit hard by new mutations of the disease.

Kenya is reaping the benefits of the Njoro partnership, as KARI develops high-yielding, Ug99-resistant wheats for the Kenyan market. Two such varieties have already been released, and KARI has produced and sold more than 200 tons of their seed. Another three varieties are in advanced testing for imminent release. Kenya currently produces only a third of its annual wheat requirement of 900,000 tons, with farmers reluctant to take the risk of losing their entire crop to rust.

In 2012 Njoro will host its fourth annual stem rust training course, with experts from Kenya, CIMMYT and around the world gathering to share knowledge with other researchers. The Njoro station also holds training days for farmers, covering early detection of stem rust, prevention methods, and resistant varieties available.

The science and agriculture organisation, CABI, has launched a free online resource designed to help extension workers, government organisations, researchers and farmers in developing countries diagnose, treat and prevent plant pests and diseases.

The Plantwise Knowledge Bank is packed with features which ensure the information it provides is useful, relevant and applicable. The diagnostic tool enables users to diagnose plant problems based on pictures of symptoms; country specific homepages mean the information shown is tailored to the user’s location; and a range of factsheets provide information about easily applicable treatments.

The Knowledge Bank map is the world’s most comprehensive distribution data source for pests and diseases. The interactive map links information from a variety of sources enabling a wide audience of users involved in the battle against pest and diseases to map and model distribution data.

The July 2012 issue of the New Zealand Bioprotection Newsletter carries an article on a major new multi-partner funded forest bioprotection project led by Dr Robert Hill of Lincoln University. The project is about “Bioprotection of Foliar Diseases and Disorders of Radiata Pine”. It will investigate ways of enhancing defence mechanisms of the pine in nurseries and forest plantations, with particular emphasis on using beneficial microbes to suppress existing foliar diseases and minimise the threat of forest biosecurity incursions. The microbes will include selected isolates of Trichoderma, which has a good track record in plant protection, Beauveria, more commonly recognised as an insect pathogen, and needle endophytes. The focus will be on controlling several diseases including those caused by Cyclaneusma minus and Dothistroma pini and the Red Needle Cast disease. The research focus will be to induce systemic resistance against foliar diseases by using endophytes and elicitors.

Dr Hill has developed several Trichoderma-based products in New Zealand for use in horticulture and forestry. In Malaysia, there has been widespread industry adoption of Trichoderma root endophytes isolated locally by Dr Hill, resulting in increased tree growth and reduced disease levels.

The American Phytopathological Society (APS) advised about the recipients of its 2012 awards. The awards were presented during the APS Awards & Honors Ceremony on 5 August during the APS Annual Meeting held from 4-8 August 2012 in Providence, Rhode Island.

The following APS members were recognized as Fellows in 2012 in recognition of distinguished contributions to plant pathology or the society:

Yehoshua Anikster, Tel Aviv University, Israel;

Richard M Bostock, University of California-Davis;

Xianming Chen, USDA-ARS;

Bruce B Clarke, Rutgers University;

Margery L Daughtrey, Cornell University;

Kenneth B Johnson, Oregon State University;

Deborah A Samac, USDA-ARS;

Ariena H C van Bruggen, University of Florida;

Guo-Liang Wang, The Ohio State University.

The Excellence in Extension Award was presented to Gail E Ruhl, senior plant disease diagnostician at the Purdue University Plant and Pest Diagnostic Lab.

William Ronald Landis, CEO of LANDIS International Inc., received the Excellence in Industry Award.

William W Bockus, professor in the Department of Plant Pathology at Kansas State University, received the Excellence in Teaching Award.

The William Boright Hewitt and Maybelle Ellen Ball Hewitt Award was presented to Peter Ojiambo, assistant professor in the Department of Plant Pathology at North Carolina State University.

Andrea Ficke, cereal pathologist at the Norwegian Institute for Agricultural and Environmental Research; Lisa Hoffman, product development manager with DuPont Crop Protection; and Megan Kennelly, associate professor in the Department of Plant Pathology at Kansas State University, received the Lee M Hutchins Award.

Vitaly Citovsky, a professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Cell Biology at the State University of New York-Stony Brook, received the Noel T Keen Award for Research Excellence in Molecular Plant Pathology.

The Ruth Allen Award was presented to Jeff L Dangl, a professor at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Rodrigo P P Almeida, assistant professor at the University of California-Berkeley in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management, received the Syngenta Award.

The new Excellence in Regulatory Affairs and Crop Security Award was presented to Robert P Kahn, retired. The newly established award recognizes outstanding contributions to regulatory plant pathology, crop security, and trade enhancement efforts by APS members.

Lawrence E Datnoff received the International Service award. Datnoff is currently a professor and head of the Department of Plant Pathology & Crop Physiology at Louisiana State University (LSU)/LSU AgCenter.

Following the recent retirement of esteemed colleague Solke de Boer and the up-coming retirements of two additional committee members, the ISPP – CTPPB has selected two new members. They are Professor T A Coutinho and Dr Sean Li as set out below. Please join the ISPP and the Committee in welcoming them.

Professor T A Coutinho

Teresa Coutinho is a Professor in the Department of Microbiology and Plant Pathology and the Forestry and Agricultural Biotechnology Institute (FABI), University of Pretoria, South Africa. She was awarded her PhD in plant pathology from the University of Natal in 1991. Her research interests include forest pathology, specifically bacterial tree pathogens. 

She has been involved in the training of 15 PhD and 29 MSc students of which 13 PhD and 24 MSc students have completed their degrees. During this period she authored or co-authored 103 publications in peer-reviewed, ISI-rated journals. She led the group that recently published several proposals for new species. These publications included genera that are unusual for bacterial plant pathogens (Tatumella, Gibbsiella) as well as more well known plant pathogenic bacterial genera (Pantoea, Pectobacterium). She has written a number of chapters in books including “Bacterial diseases of plants in South Africa” published in 2009.  She was also the senior editor in this case.

She sequenced the genome of the first plant pathogen in Africa and is an authority on Pantoea taxonomy and pathogenicity. She is involved in several professional bodies, notably as an editorial board member of the Southern Forests, chairperson of the organizing committee of the 2nd International “Erwinia” workshop held in Reunion in 2010, and past convener of the NRF Assessment panel for Microbiology and Plant Pathology.  She is currently president of the Southern African Society for Plant Pathology (2011-2014).

Her contact details are: Teresa A Coutinho, Department of Microbiology and Plant Pathology, Forestry and Agricultural Biotechnology Institute (FABI), University of Pretoria, Pretoria 0002, South Africa, at e-mail.

Dr Sean Li

(Sean) Xiang Li is a research scientist at the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, working on classification and diagnoses of plant pathogenic bacteria. His current research focuses on developing novel diagnostic platforms for potato brown rot, blackleg, zebrachip and phytoplasma diseases based on genomic and barcoding techniques.

He earned his PhD in 1993 under A C Hayward in Australia with earlier contributions to the phylogenetic classification of Ralstonia and Bulkholderia. He was postdoctoral research in Dr. Solke De Boer’s lab in Vancouver from 1993-1995, where he developed molecular detection and classification techniques on Clavibacter spp.. Subsequently, his research led him to the Department of Microbiology and Immunology of UBC and then to a pharmaceutical company where his research concentrated on soil microbial diversity and Streptomyces genetics. He has also been a professor for Chinese Academy of Sciences researching metagenomics of oceanic microbes. He authored or co-authored more than 60 scientific publications in peer-reviewed journals and 5 chapter books, and filed 5 patent applications with authorization. He has served as the Chairperson of a Technical Advisory Group on Ralstonia for the NAPPO Potato Panel, and is an editorial board member of ACTA Microbiological Sinica since 2007.

His contact details are: (Sean) Xiang Li, Canadian Food Inspection Agency, Charlottetown Laboratory, 93 Mount Edward Road, Charlottetown, PE C1A 5T1, Canada, at e-mail.

The ISPP project about “Changing Public Perceptions and Opinions on Global Food Security” started in 2007 in South Africa and is now completed. It was supported by the ISPP Task Force on Global Food Security. The latest information from Professor Lise Korsten and colleagues about the Background to the project, about the Final Report and a resulting video has been included recently on the ISPP web-site about achievements under the project.

Plasmodiophorids

Professor Emeritus J P Braselton of Ohio University has a web-site which shows a general view of what has been happening with the classification of the Plasmodiophorids.

It can be seen at http://www.ohio.edu/people/braselto/plasmos/.

He recommends that readers visit the Introduction page for this view of what has been happening with the classification. A lot has changed since his retirement in 2000, and anyone interested in the plasmodiophorids needs to keep abreast of the molecular studies and updated phylogenies. He has added "Personal Comments" to several of the pages to give visitors to the site an idea of how specimens were collected from different interesting locations and the people who helped obtain many of the specimens. He has also have been updating some of the images. When he first went online on 12 December 1995, methods for scanning images and putting them on websites were crude compared to standards used today. Eventually most of the inferior images will be replaced with images that have been edited with GIMP.

His research was supported in part by The National Science Foundation, the Ohio University Research Committee, and the Baker Fund of Ohio University.

A new homothallic Phytophthora species, isolated from rhizosphere soil and roots of declining or dead Rubus anglocandicans (European blackberry) in south-west Western Australia, is described as Phytophthora bilorbang sp. nov. The chosen name refers to a Noongar (southwest Australian Aboriginal) word for a person living on the banks of a river. This is reported in Aghighi, S; Hardy, G E S J; Scott, J K; Burgess, T I. (2012). Phytophthora bilorbang sp. nov., a new species associated with the decline of Rubus anglocandicans (European blackberry) in Western Australia. European Journal of Plant Pathology 133 (4) 841-855.

Forestry Images is a joint project of the Center for Invasive Species and Ecosystem Health, USDA Forest Service, the International Society of Arboriculture and The University of Georgia, particularly the Warnell School of Forestry and Natural Resources and the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences.

Many pictures of most aspects of forest plants can be found on the site http://www.forestryimages.org/browse/hostimages.cfm?host=4252. Forest diseases are at http://www.forestryimages.org/diseases.cfm.

These are themes of the 12th International Plant Virus Epidemiology Symposium to be held in Tanzania in early 2013 as shown in Coming Events and at http://www.iita.org/web/ipve. The symposium is one of a series held under the auspices of the International Committee on Plant Virus Epidemiology of the International Society of the International Society of Plant Pathology (ISPP) at http://www.isppweb.org/ICPVE/.

The 12th symposium will focus on the emergence, epidemiology and control of native and newly encountered virus diseases in the prevailing situation of virus diseases in Africa and around the world that are not only ravaging crop production, but also affecting the international exchange of germplasm and commerce. The symposium will provide a forum for exchange of the latest knowledge and technologies to control virus diseases and pave the way for an African and global strategy to combat emerging and re-emerging plant virus diseases.

Distinguishing these two species by morphology and culture is difficult because both are quite diverse. A qualitative molecular method to readily distinguish between these two species has thus been developed. It was published as Bo Liu, F J Louws, T B Sutton and J C Correll (2012). A rapid qualitative molecular method for the identification of Colletotrichum acutatum and C. gloeosporioides. European Journal of Plant Pathology 132 (4) 593-607.

The 31st General Assembly of the International Union of Biological Sciences (IUBS) was held from 5-9 July 2012 in Suzhou, China. About 400 participants attended the General Assembly and the Scientific Sessions. Among them were 19 representatives of IUBS National Members and 15 representatives of IUBS Scientific Members.

A new international and interdisciplinary Executive Committee was elected for the triennium 2012-2015: Nils Christian Stenseth, (President, Norway), Yury Dgebuadze (Vice-President, Russia), Zhibin Zhang (Vice-President, China Beijing), Hiroyuki Takeda (Secretary General, Japan), Santiago Merino (Treasurer, Spain), Regine Jahn (Germany), Peter Kevan (ICPBR), Laszlo Lenard (Hungary), David Patterson (OPTIMA), Lily Rodriguez (WCH), L S Shashidhara (India) and Jen-Leih Wu (China Taipei).

In his speech, the new President, Professor Nils Christian Stenseth, announced that the IUBS will contribute to the development of a Unified Biology, by promoting: 1) biological research covering all sub-disciplines, 2) communication of insight derived from biological research to a broad audience, 3) training of young people all over the world.

IUBS welcomed three new IUBS Members: Uruguay as a new National Member of IUBS, Mongolia as an Associate Member of IUBS and the International Committee on Bionomenclature (ICB) as a Scientific Member of IUBS.

This is the title of a new book by Roger Leakey, who was Professor of Agroforestry and Novel Crops Unit, James Cook University, Australia, until 2006. Currently he is Vice Chairman of the International Tree Foundation, a UK registered charity, and Vice President of the International Society of Tropical Foresters. The book was published by CABI as a paper and hard back in July 2012. Leakey is a prominent tree biologist and a past director of research at the World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF). He is a member of the celebrated East African Leakey family of natural historians, paleontologists and environmentalists. See: www.rogerleakey.com and www.cabi.org/bookshop.

In the book, he argues that abject rural poverty, food insecurity, land degradation and climate change can be relatively easily addressed through the widespread application of agroforestry, especially in the tropics and sub-tropics. He states that The Convenient Truth is that we already know that agroforestry works, thanks to over three decades of research. His conclusions are based on first-hand experience working with rural farmers in Africa, Asia, Oceania and Latin America, where the devastating effects of environmental degradation, poverty, malnutrition and hunger are strongly felt. Leakey says a fresh approach both to food production and the use of natural resources is needed if we are to avoid the food crises expected to touch every country in the world by the middle of this century. “We need to rehabilitate degraded land, diversify farming systems and protect watersheds,” he states.

The book presents a three-point action plan to boost food and nutritional security, particularly in the world’s poorest regions. The approach involves tapping into the ecological power of trees to enrich, stabilize and intensify local farming systems. This approach will benefit from crop domestication to introduce additional valuable tropical tree species into the farming landscape. The result will be diversified, multifunctional farmlands that better meet people’s food and other tree-product requirements, while at the same time restoring the planet’s ecological balance.