Norwich, United Kingdom
June, 2009
A project to combat a newly
emerging disease of barley is being launched. It will pull
together the efforts of plant scientists, breeders and industry
to prevent this disease establishing and help UK farmers produce
barley cost-effectively without additional impact on the
environment.
Finding ways to combat cereal diseases is crucial to ensure food
security going into the future.
Ramularia leaf spot is a fungal disease of barley that has come
to prominence in the last ten years. It is a significant problem
in Ireland and Scotland, and is spreading into England, with
Norfolk seeing a major outbreak last year. The disease has
already taken hold in northern Europe, especially in Germany and
Scandinavia, where it causes substantial yield losses.
The rapid increase in importance of this disease means ways of
controlling the fungus and breeding resistant varieties are
still in their infancy. In order to ensure the security of our
food supply, cost-effective and environmentally-benign control
methods need to be developed. Little scientific study has been
carried out on the fungus to date, so CORACLE provides a timely
opportunity to tackle the problem while it is still at a
manageable level.
CORACLE will improve the control of ramularia in the field,
helping barley producers to combat the disease and reduce
fungicide applications. The scientists and companies working on
the project will take an integrated approach. In the short term,
CORACLE aims to reduce the severity of ramularia outbreaks in
the field and to stop the disease spreading in contaminated
barley grain. In the longer term, the research will help plant
breeders to produce barley varieties that are more resistant to
ramularia.
CORACLE is coordinated by Professor James Brown of the
John Innes Centre in
Norwich, an institute of the BBSRC. He said, “We still don’t
know very much about this disease. Over the next four years,
we’ll be improving our scientific knowledge of Ramularia and
helping the farming industry to combat it.”
Stuart Knight of The Arable Group, one of the CORACLE partners,
outlined the threat this disease poses to UK agronomy:
“Ramularia is now a UK-wide problem that can affect winter as
well as spring barley. Control strategies targeted at other
common pathogens may not be fully effective at minimising the
impact of this disease.”
The Scottish Agricultural College
(SAC) and the Scottish Crop
Research Institute (SCRI) are research partners in the
project. Dr Simon Oxley, senior researcher at SAC, said “The
launch of this project will build upon our existing knowledge
about the epidemiology of the disease and resistance to
fungicides. By working with plant breeders and industry in this
new project, we can look to the future to develop varieties with
resistance to this important disease.”
The project consortium includes plant breeders and agro-chemical
companies. Dr Peter Werner, a breeder at KWS UK Ltd, said: “The
control of diseases and pests is a very high priority to both
the breeding and agro-chemical industries but to date only
limited progress has been made towards Ramularia control. We
need the improved understanding of the pathology of the disease
that this project offers and expect to be able to use this to
aid the development of new varieties and products.”
The John Innes Centre, www.jic.ac.uk, is an independent,
world-leading research centre in plant and microbial sciences
with over 800 staff. JIC is based on Norwich Research Park and
carries out high quality fundamental, strategic and applied
research to understand how plants and microbes work at the
molecular, cellular and genetic levels. The JIC also trains
scientists and students, collaborates with many other research
laboratories and communicates its science to end-users and the
general public. The JIC is an Institute of the Biotechnology and
Biological Sciences Research Council.
The Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council
(BBSRC) is the UK funding agency for research in the life
sciences. Sponsored by Government, BBSRC annually invests around
£450M in a wide range of research that makes a significant
contribution to the quality of life for UK citizens and supports
a number of important industrial stakeholders including the
agriculture, food, chemical, healthcare and pharmaceutical
sectors. BBSRC carries out its mission by funding
internationally competitive research, providing training in the
biosciences, fostering opportunities for knowledge transfer and
innovation and promoting interaction with the public and other
stakeholders on issues of scientific interest in universities,
centres and institutes.
The Babraham Institute, Institute for Animal Health, Institute
of Food Research, John Innes Centre and Rothamsted Research are
Institutes of BBSRC. The Institutes conduct long-term,
mission-oriented research using specialist facilities. They have
strong interactions with industry, Government departments and
other end-users of their research. |
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