Wheat breeder learns from this year's stripe rust

Farm and Ranch September 20, 2010 Winter wheat breeder Arron Carter of Washington State University says more emphasis is going to be put on genes for all stage seedling resistance for stripe rust after the events of this year. Carter says breeders had kind of stayed away from the seedling resistance because races of stripe rust can easily overcome it. The focus was on high temperature adult plant resistance.

Carter: “And as we saw this year that high temperature adult plant resistance is really durable but it does need that high temperature and we saw that break down with our cool, wet spring. And so we kind of re-evaluated our thinking of how we are going to combine these two forms and it has been in the works. We have been bringing up the lines with these pyramidal resistances. They just haven‘t been out in full force yet. And to be able to pyramid these we have to use molecular techniques with molecular markers and some of that has not been available to date. So now in the programs we are getting to that point where we have enough information we can put these two together and we have lines that are in advanced testing now that have both forms combined that are performing well.”

Carter, who is relatively new to his position, also went back to look over the germplasm he had relative to stripe rust.

Carter: “Even looking back at some of the crosses, what parent lines were contributing better resistance than others. So I learned a lot about the genetic side of it and what I can plan for in the future as far as crossing and what to look for.”

I’m Bob Hoff and that’s the Northwest Farm and Ranch Report on Northwest Aginfo Net.

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