Speaking of Denise Costich, she recently visited CIMMYT’s Global Maize Program in Africa and shared this photo — frightening, and yet also hopeful, as she explains below:
Maize Lethal Necrosis (MLN) is being called the “Ebola of maize” — it is actually a “perfect storm” of two viruses hitting the plants at the same time, carried all over the place by insect vectors… It’s hitting East Africa really hard right now, and CIMMYT scientists are screening as much germplasm as they can, in the search for resistance genes. Here you see an example of a “moderately tolerant” line. To the left of that plot, you can see another line that was completely decimated…
I’m featuring Denise a lot lately to make up for the fact that I forgot to take a photo of her to include in the mosaic of CGIAR genebank managers :)
How did you know that I did feel a bit sad that I didn’t make it into the genebank managers’ photo gallery?
Because I felt so guilty about it…
Good MCMV tolerance is widespred in 200+ inbreds we’ve tested in Hawaii. About 30 highly tolerant, about 60 highly susceptible (lot of it temperate and probably similar to E. African white dents).
Haven’t summarized this in pub or on our website yet. Am corresponding to someone at CIMMYT…Jim
He’s corresponding with Terry Molnar, landrace maize breeder at CIMMYT in the SeeD Project. Terry is heading the MLN resistance search in our germplasm collection. We are having a “war room” strategy session this coming week….
Thanks, Denise. What does a landrace breeder do?