Using field pathogenomics to study wheat yellow rust dispersal and population dynamics at a national and international scale

Abstracts are not currently available in GtR for all funded research. This is normally because the abstract was not required at the time of proposal submission, but may be because it included sensitive information such as personal details.

PI Saunders will lead the impact plan that will be an agenda item at monthly project meetings with Co-I's. All Co-I's have excellent track records in communicating the outcomes of their research to a broad audience and sharing tools, resources and code in a free and open manner. The PI and Co-I's also are regularly invited to speak about their research at national/international meetings and at various other venues.

Beneficiaries include:

Those involved in wheat yellow rust surveillance such as the UK cereal pathogen virulence survey (funded by Fera and the HGCA). They will benefit from development of high-resolution genotyping methods that will be incorporated into the UKCPVS. During the project, information will also be relayed to the UKCPVS as soon as relevant and reported in the NIAB-TAG's quarterly journal (Landmark) to reach the > 3000 NIAB-TAG members including agronomists, breeders and farmers.

Researchers working with wheat yellow rust disease. All data will be made freely available where practical, at the earliest opportunity. The data will initially be hosted via a modified version of the TGAC http://opendata.tgac.ac.uk website to ensure rapid release under a creative commons license. Once submitted for publication all data will be deposited in public repositories and linked to via the project-specific website.

Farmers, breeders, agronomists and wheat variety testing authorities will benefit from the rapid means of confirming whether previously resistant wheat varieties have been broken by virulent races of the pathogen. Our research will also confirm outbreaks on particular wheat varieties and look for associations between pathogen genotypes and host pedigrees. Participation of four major UK wheat breeders (KWS, Limagrain, Syngenta, RAGT) as partners reflects the urgency of the problem. Understanding the underlying variation and how this affects resistance breeding is essential for the strategic planning required to produce high-yielding wheat varieties that will be resistant when deployed in 10 years (considering time between initial crossing and variety release). This may also lead directly to management decisions on how to effectively manage the threat of PST to UK wheat production. This audience will be reached through publications in the farming press. For instance, results from our preliminary study have already been reported in EDP24, the HGCA newsletter, NIAB-TAG bulletin, world-grain.com, Farmers Guardian, Agrii company newsletter, EADT24 and the Crop Production Magazine.

Population geneticists. Where possible new tools and data analysis pipelines generated herein will be integrated into the interactive Galaxy user interface to ensure they are accessible to the widest demographic, that includes bench biologists. All tools and pipelines once verified will be publically released without delay.

The general public will benefit from interactions with the PI and Co-I's, who have given talks to public audiences on a variety of issues such as plant biosecurity. They will specifically focus on further educating the public on genome science and pathogen dispersal in relation to plant pathogens and the crops they infect. They will give at least one talk to a public audience relating to this project, at least once per year.

The PDRA's, programmer and RA recruited for this project will benefit from improved skills, knowledge and experience gained from the research and wider training. This will contribute to their future economic activity in the public and/or private sectors. The innovative nature of the project ensures these individuals will likely develop unique skills that should prove highly attractive in the marketplace. This proposal also brings together an array of disciplines that will provide an exciting training ground for a cadre of excellent young scientists. This will contribute to the next generation of skilled crop scientists, with benefits beyond the immediate outcomes of this project