University of Minnesota scientists battle global wheat scourge
Mutant fungus Ug99 threatens world crops and even political stability.
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The battlefields are 8,000 miles away in Africa and the Middle East. But from their bunkers of dew chambers and greenhouses in St. Paul, a strike force of University of Minnesota plant experts is devising strategies to win a high-stakes war that could prevent famine, starvation and political unrest.
The enemy, Puccinia graminis, is a new mutant strain of fungus that erupts from pockmarks on the stems of wheat and barley, exploding with millions of rusty red spores that can blow across continents.Nicknamed Ug99 after it was discovered in Uganda in 1999, this new race of stem rust is the rabbit of cereal grain pathogens -- creating new generations of spores in a matter of weeks. It has crippled wheat farms in East Africa and jumped across the Red Sea to Yemen and Iran.
"This fungus has such a tremendously explosive reproductive capacity," said Brian Steffenson, a plant pathology professor at the U who travels regularly to the Ug99 front lines in Kenya. "By way of the prevailing winds, we're now afraid that if Ug99 gets a beachhead in the Middle East, it can spread to the breadbaskets of south Asia, Pakistan and India.
"That," he said, "would be absolutely devastating for the world's wheat and economy."
Eighty percent of the world's wheat and 95 percent of the Upper Midwest region's top bread-baking grain is vulnerable to the new pathogen, according to University of Minnesota wheat breeder Jim Anderson.
"The stem rust fungus, like various flu strains that attack humans, is capable of mutating and overcoming the resistance of previously resistant cereal crops," Steffenson said. "The 800-pound gorilla in the room is whether Ug99 will ever make its way to the western hemisphere and into our region."
Anderson thinks it's "a matter of when, rather than if" the new rust finds its way to the Red River Valley and other North American wheat fields, prompting a scramble among scientists to cross new varieties of wheat genes that can resist the scourge.
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