New Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science Dr Peter Dodds is designing innovative synthetic rust resistance genes to protect the world’s most important food crops from rust diseases.
Rust fungi cause economically disastrous diseases of cereal crops and are a particular threat to the Australian wheat industry, with the potential to cause losses of up to $300 million per year.
CSIRO’s Peter Dodds has been studying how the plant immune system 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.
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’ team is now exploring opportunities to engineer new recognition capacities for disease resistance into cereal crops.
He will present his work today at the new Fellows seminar as part of the Academy’s annual Science at the Shine Dome event in Canberra today at 2.15 pm.
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