You may remember the recent warnings about a new strain of wheat stem rust called Ug99 making its way from the Rift Valley of Africa across the Red Sea to Yemen, thus threatening the very home of wheat in the Middle East. Jeremy blogged about it a couple of months back. Well, resistance to the disease has now been found in about 70% of the 100-odd samples of a wild wheat (Aegilops sharonensis) collected in southern Lebanon and Israel, according to a paper in Plant Disease. Four of the samples actually have resistance to a whole range of fungal diseases:
Co-author of the paper, Yehoshua Aniksterat, of the Israel-based Institute for Cereal Crops Improvement at Tel Aviv University, told SciDev.Net that although it could be difficult — and take up to five years or more — they may be able to transfer genes from wild to cultivated wheat.
The map below is what GBIF knows about the geographic distribution of A. sharonensis ((Israel Nature and Parks Authority, Israel Nature and Parks Authority (accessed through GBIF data portal, http://data.gbif.org/datasets/resource/1431, 2007-08-14) US National Plant Germplasm System, United States National Plant Germplasm System Collection (accessed through GBIF data portal, http://data.gbif.org/datasets/resource/1429, 2007-08-14).)).
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