DISEASE:

THE NEW

ENEMY

Other Breeding Projects

 

• On the fruit and vegetable side, Monsanto is working on resistance to bacterial wilt in tomato, one of the most damaging diseases to tomatoes. New hybrids are being developed using traditional and marker-assisted breeding techniques to combine outstanding fruiting hybrids with those that have resistance to multiple diseases. Monsanto is also working on resistance to phytophthora blight in pepper, one of the most destructive pepper diseases as it attacks the roots, stems, leaves and fruit. Conventional and molecular breeding approaches are being used to introduce resistance into commercial products which will be targeted for production in Korea and the broader, global market.

 

• To date, not much work has been done breeding disease-resistant barley. However, thanks to a two-year $1 million grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Cooperative State Research, Education and Extension Service, researchers at the University of California, Riverside now will be able to advance their work on sequencing the barley genome and breeding new barley varieties.

 

• Australia’s Hexima Limited just announced its third consecutive year of positive results in cotton field trials to fight fusarium wilt in cotton. The trials demonstrated that the cotton with the antifungal trait had a 20% higher plant survival rate and lint yields that were more than two fold higher than the non-GM control. Importantly, the GM-cotton plants showed no yield penalty in the absence of disease and no difference in lint quality. The company is currently expanding its technology in a range of crops, including corn, soy and canola. Hexima is collaborating with Pioneer Hi-Bred International to commercialize antifungal technology in corn and soy.