Putting Up Resistance | The Scientist Magazine®
Traditionally, breeders have introduced resistance traits into crops by crossing commercial plants with other wheat varieties or related taxa that are able to fend off a pathogen. Using this method, Borlaug successfully bred stem rust–resistant plants that thwarted other races of the once-devastating pathogen for four decades. (See "Wheat Whisperer, circa 1953.") Then, in 1998, scientists detected Ug99, a race of stem rust that had finally found a way around the crop’s main rust defenses.
“The problem was [that rust resistance] lasted 40 years,” says Les Szabo, a geneticist at the CDL. As a result, governments became complacent in their efforts to breed wheat varieties with different resistance genes and to track how rust races were evolving. Stem rust became “a forgotten corner of plant pathology,” agrees Matt Rouse of the CDL. So when the pathogen reared its head again the late ’90s, it took the wheat research community by surprise....
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