Cereal killer's deadly touch could lead to new wheat threat

摘要

SCIENTISTS have uncovered the origins of the world's deadliest strain of cereal rust disease which threatens global food security. CSIRO researchers - together with partners in the US and South Africa - have solved a 20-year-old mystery with findingspublished recently in Nature Communications.Their works shows that the devastating Ug99 strain of the wheat stem rust fungus (named for its discovery and naming in Uganda in 1999) was created when different rust strains simply fused to create a new hybrid strain.This process is called somatic hybridisation and enables the fungi to merge their cells together and exchange genetic material without going through the complex sexual reproduction cycle.