Table 4 Future directions towards the management of wheat blast disease
Strategy | Proposed action |
|---|---|
Public awareness | a) A concerted global effort to increase awareness of the plight of the challenge in feeding the increasing global population. b) More effort to enhance awareness of the need for international cooperation and philanthropy to fund strategies that boost wheat production and protect the crop from worrisome blast disease. c) Strictly follow the rules and regulations of quarantine during global trading of wheat seeds/grains. |
Plant perspective | a) More research is needed to find out new resistance sources and discover novel durable broad-spectrum resistant genes from wheat genetic resources. b) More research is needed to elucidate molecular cross-talks between wheat plant and blast fungus for the development of a management strategy against the disease. c) An international cooperative research program is needed to systematically pyramid resistance genes in local elite cultivars. d) Develop convenient methods for transformation of wheat varieties. e) Breeding program for the deployment of available R genes and mutagenesis of S genes by using CRISPR-Cas technology. |
Pathogen perspective | a) Effort to start an integrated international research to monitor the genetic composition and virulence diversity of blast populations in Bangladesh and South America over time and space. b) Develop convenient diagnostic tools for monitoring and surveillance of the pathogen. c) Develop infection assays that identify all blast avirulence genes across an extended and universally applicable repertoire of differential wheat cultivars. |
Biological and chemical control | a) Develop elite strains of biocontrol agents from the native environments through extensive screening. b) Disease control to be assessed in field trials and not in laboratory or in restricted glasshouse tests. c) Evaluation and continuous monitoring of the virulence status of introduced biocontrol agents. d) Assessment of biocontrol agent efficacy under different environments. e) Extensive research effort to find new broad-spectrum, low-dose-rate and low-ecological-impact fungicides via the rational design of target-site-specific antifungals. f) Discovery of new plant activator chemistries but with appropriate evaluation of their effect on wheat growth and crop yield. g) Genome-wide screening for wheat genes encoding antifungal proteins. h) Field evaluation of transgenics in disease control and durability. |