About the Project
Plant diseases place a serious constraint on global crop production. Combined with environmental stress, they represent a significant threat to food security. The loss of protectant agrochemicals places increased reliance on crop resistance to combat disease. Therefore, new sources of disease resistance need to be identified and incorporated into novel commercial crop varieties. This requires researchers and crop breeders to identify plants with heightened resistance for use in breeding schemes…
and to understand the biological basis of such resistance.
This project brings together academia and industry to identify new sources of resistance to crop disease. You will use resources provided by one of the UK’s leading plant breeding companies to devise and use approaches to locate novel disease resistance with the supervisory help of crop resistance experts.
The target disease is parsnip root canker, a common but under-studied disease and a major constraint to production of this in-demand crop. It discolours the top of the root, leading to rotting, crop rejection and financial loss. Root canker is caused by a range of plant pathogenic fungi. but we know very little about the basis of plant resistance to these organisms.
You will establish a screening system that can detect parsnip resistance to root canker in developing plants. Earlier seedling and detached-root methods provided insights but do not correlate well with either each other or field observations meaning new assessment methods are required. You will then use this to search for resistance in parsnip lines provided by the industry partner and employ genetic and gene expression analysis to examine the underlying basis of resistance and determine genes contributing to beneficial traits. This will help increase crop quality and yield to help safeguard food provision for the future.
