Research Projects

In India, almost all recently released wheat varieties have fallen prey to the ever-evolving yellow rust pathotypes (most prominently, a recent pathotype 238S119), creating an immediate necessity to combine novel rust resistance into the high-yielding genetic backgrounds in hexaploid bread wheat. The crop losses from stripe rusts are occurring in many farmers’ fields right now and the losses are substantial. It's easy to visibly realize the problem as wheat varieties released not more than 10 years ago and having more than 50% of seed indents have slowly fallen prey to newly evolving rust pathotypes. We have also realized the importance of developing wheat varieties in combination with yield and rust resistance. It is of utmost important to solve the problem, as it is re-occurring and improvement is timely essential. Besides, there is an immense chance to overcome this problem by using the novel genes integrated from diverse sources. If we do not start using new sources in our breeding programmes now, our varieties keep on failing due to disease susceptibility as the resistant genes in India have been slowly overcome by rust pathotypes. Most interestingly, durum wheats (T. durum) are normally grown in the central and peninsular part of India. These growing areas, do not witness many occurrences of stripe rust and hence we believe that these durums are not selected against for stripe rust resistance for a long time, as it requires high humidity and cooler temperature (10-20) for its infection and spread, which is not available in the central part of India. In other words, though the "AB" genomes are common between the durum and bread wheat, the environmental conditions under which these wheat are grown are entirely different. This implies that there is always a possibility of variation created in durum's, which is not available in the bread wheat. Hence, we are interested to study the genetics and to characterize the resistance in tetraploid durum wheats against newly evolved and virulent stripe rust pathotype 238S119 for their effective utilization in their deployment in hexaploid bread wheats. In the previous years, we evaluated few durum lines received from Agarkar Research Institute, Pune; Indian Institute of Wheat and Barley Research, Karnal and University of Agricultural sciences, Dharwad, Karnataka for the stripe rust resistance under the artificial epiphytotic conditions. We have interestingly found that these durum would carry sources of crucial stripe rust resistance genes which can be readily incorporated into the bread wheat varieties. The characterization and mapping of stripe rust resistance loci/s among these lines would be helpful in improving the bread wheat genotypes to a significant extent against this fungal disease. In this background, the current project is proposed to characterize durum lines from different sources through GWAS and biparental mapping for stripe rust resistance against 238S119.