Robert Koebner spills the beans on that Striga-resistant cowpea. It “has the boring name B-301”. and once you know that, it is easy to find out more. There’s a moral in all this too:
The presence of unexpected resistances crops up all the time. A celebrated example is the gene for resistance to wheat eyespot disease, which was detected in a wild relative endemic to the Mediterranean basin, where the eyespot fungus does not exist.
It does make one wonder … how many other things are hiding out there. It might be that it’s a mistake to take the rational view that suggest that it’s more likely that one will find a resistance gene among plant populations where the pathogen is present, or to find salinity tolerance in saline environments etc. But it’s hard to justify such irrationality when it comes to writing a grant proposal!
More’s the pity.