The impact of fungal rust pathogens is measured in tens of thousands of acres of lost crops annually and an increasingly vulnerable supply chain. An outbreak of oat crown rust devastated yields in South Dakota and Minnesota, wiping out as much as 50% of the crop in 2014 alone.
Current surveillance rust collections are not enough to develop effective countermeasures against fungal rust pathogens such as oat crown rust, wheat stem rust, and many others. Now Phase Genomics has received a National Institute of Food and Agriculture grant to develop a cutting-edge genomic diagnostic test to affordably identify existing and novel strains of fungal pathogens in the wild.
Phase Genomics’ proprietary technology allows it to generate full chromosome-scale rust genomes and separate their constituent sub-genomes, creating a unique genomic resource that will provide the sequence information needed to identify, track, and study virulent fungal strains. Since the platform will employ machine learning tools combined with genomics, as the dataset grows it will potentially enable scientists to proactively predict the virulence of new wild strains before they have a chance to decimate crops. Costs from traditional diagnostic techniques are expected to be reduced by up to 90%.
The same proven and proprietary technology was demonstrated by researchers producing a first-of-its-kind reference genome for the wheat stem rust pathogenic strain Ug99. The economically destructive pathogen with a dikaryotic genome structure (two independent nuclei) is a crop killer on several continents.
The new ability to leverage high-quality genomic information from sets of rust strains will transform researchers’ ability to diagnose, track crop disease spread and understand the evolution of fungal virulence.
Learn more about leveraging this technology in your agricultural research here.
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