Submitted by Anna Davies on Wed, 28/11/2012 - 16:36
Researchers in the Department of Plant Sciences at the University of Cambridge have been awarded two grants geared towards managing crop disease from the BBSRC-led programme called 'Sustainable Crop Production Research for International Development' (SCPRID).
Dr Julian Hibberd's £1.4m programme, "Wild rice MAGIC" aims to increase drought tolerance and tolerance to bacterial and viral infections in domesticated rice using naturally existing variation in wild rice species. Compared to wild varieties, modern crops have less variation in their genome due to the artificial selection of certain traits which has occurred over thousands of years. The team will use high-throughput sequencing to provide information about how the genomes have mixed and how they interact, and then identify those genes that confer ability to resist environmental stresses, such as drought.
Working with an international team of researchers from the Philippines, India and Tanzania will then spend the next five years mixing alleles from six wild rices with two cultivated varieties. If successful, seeds of the new, hardier rices will be supplied to local farmers to start harvesting.
A further project led by John Carr, Chris Gilligan and David Baulcombe ‘Modelling and manipulation of plant-aphid interactions: A new avenue for sustainable disease management of an important crop in Africa’ aims to understand how changes in plant biochemistry caused by virus infection alter the behaviour of aphids (insects that transmit viruses between plants) and to see how this knowledge could be used to better protect crop plants against these insects and the viruses they transmit. In this £2m project the main focus is on bean and its viruses and the work will be carried out in collaboration with colleagues at Rothamsted and in Kenya and Uganda.
More information on both projects can be found at:
http://www.bbsrc.ac.uk/publications/topic/scprid.aspx and http://www.bbsrc.ac.uk/web/FILES/Publications/1210-scprid.pdf