Map based cloning and characterisation of plant loci conferring resistance to the root infecting fungus (4978)

Ensuring global food security for the ever-growing global population is a major concern. Fungal pathogens destroy a substantial amount of all food and feed crops each year (~15%). Take-all (TA) is the most important threat to wheat root system health. This disease is caused by the fungus Gaeumannomyces tritici, which infects the roots and damages the vasculature tissue of the plants, thereby adversely affecting water and nutrient uptake. In high disease years, TA causes over 50% yield loss in the field and causes nitrate leaching from the soil into neighbouring watercourses as a result of the crop's reduced capacity to uptake soil nitrogen. Growers have few effective TA management strategies and there are no characterised sources of genetic resistance, so there is an urgent need to identify and deploy reliable, environmentally-friendly and durable sources of TA resistance. The best way forward is to find and exploit genetic sources of resistance to protect UK, European and global wheat crops from TA disease without compromising plant health and yield. The student will use multiple bioinformatics approaches to predict and develop a high priority candidate gene list for the genomic regions associated with TA resistance identified from selected Watkins wheat lines from a Genome Wide Association Study (GWAS) analysis and the lines selected from a biparental mapping population analysis. Functional validation of these candidate genes will be done in the laboratory using transient virus induced gene silencing method (VIGS) and/or virus over-expression (VOX) in roots combined with root imaging and quantitative disease assessments. This new knowledge will permit the student and the advisory team to devise new TA control strategies. This collaborative project is multidisciplinary with strong functional genomics, computational biology and bioimaging components.