An MSU professor and a team of researchers from across the country have discovered the DNA sequence they say can help control a fungus that cuts crop yields and produces toxins.
New farming practices and climate change have made the fungus, known as Fusarium graminearum, a problem for farmers during the last 10 years.
Fungicides have been used to combat the problem, but nothing has been proven effective, researchers say.
"We've tried to find the weak link in the disease process," said Corby Kistler, a researcher from the University of Minnesota's ARS Cereal Disease Lab. "If you know how the disease occurs maybe you can interrupt that process."
The fungus infects the kernels of wheat and barley crops with toxins, so come harvest time the yield is rendered worthless. Where wheat and barley crops are the main crop, such as in Michigan, this can place an economic burden on the farmer, said Frances Trail, MSU assistant professor of plant biology.
Trail was already studying the fungus when she met Kistler and Jin-Rong Xu, a researcher at Purdue University, at the U.S. Department of Agriculture Wheat and Barley Scab Initiative in 1998. The group decided to pool their knowledge of the fungus and work together on solving the problem. The USDA put $2 million toward the research.
By 2001, the team had approached researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Whitehead Institute Center for Genome Research to undertake the sequencing process.
"The goal of the project was to sample the evolution history," said Li-Jun Ma, researcher at the institute. The sequencing the fungus was part of a group of fungi the institute was conducting.
"We now have the total blueprint for that pathogen, which is good but it is also a daunting task," Kistler said. There are 12,000 genes the researchers have to now search through to find which are causing the disease.
"We're basically looking for a needle in a haystack here," Kistler said.
Once the group finds what genes are producing the spores that infect the plant, they can design controls inhibiting the fungus.
"Genes are like faucets, you can turn it on and turn it off," Kistler said.
