Researchers from the University of Sydney’s Faculty of Agriculture and Environment sought to find a gene that can stand up to the Ug99 stem rust pathogen, which has decimated wheat crops in a curl of countries spreading east from Uganda and up into Yemen.

Today it threatens approximately 90 percent of the globe’s wheat farms.

“Wheat crops worldwide are vulnerable to this fungal disease and it has ruined entire harvests in Africa and the Middle East. The promise of creating wheat with greater resistance to stem rust is of major importance to the agricultural industry,” Professor Harbans Bariana told Physorg.

Dr. Bariana and his team cloned the Sr33 gene from goat grass, a prohibited weed in present day Australia that was widely cultivated during the Bronze age, and then plugged it into a modern wheat gene to test its efficacy against Ug99.

It is resistant, quite like the Sr35 gene detected by American researchers Eduard Akhunov, associate professor of plant pathology at Kansas State University, and his colleague, Jorge Dubcovsky from the University of California-Davis.

That gene was discovered in einkorn wheat grown in Turkey, Physorg reported in an earlier story, a country whose culture has grown up alongside bread.

The results of both studies were first printed in the journal Science, and their potential contribution to humanity can’t be stressed enough.

:: Physorg

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