CSIRO’s rusty research could protect cereal crops

CSIRO researcher Dr Peter Dodds is developing synthetic rust resistance genes that that could help protect cereal crops from damage by rust diseases.

It’s estimated that rust fungi has the potential to cause up to $300 million in losses to the Australian wheat industry each year.

Dr Dodds, the new Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science, has been studying how plants’ immune systems can recognise and respond to these rust fungi, in order to develop novel disease-control strategies.

“We isolated the first rust avirulence protein and showed that it is secreted into the host plant during infection,” said Dr Dodds, explaining that the avirulence protein identifies the rust fungi as an unwanted intruder to the plant.

“We then demonstrated that the pathogen protein triggers immunity by direct protein-protein interaction with a host resistance protein.”

Dr Dodds’ research team is hoping to engineer new recognition capabilities for disease resistance into cereal crops.