Scientists are warning that the wheat fungus disease that has threatened South American productions could spread globally.
Wheat Fungus Disease
There has been a wheat blast outbreak of the Magnaporthe oryzae pathogen across areas in Asia and Africa. According to Nature, this originated from a single family of fungi that was brought all the way from South America. The findings were reported in the PLOS Biology journal.
Nick Talbot, a co-author of the study and a plant pathologist from Sainsbury Laboratory in Norwich, UK, says that the wheat fungus disease is extremely serious. It threatens the cultivation of wheat in some of the world's poorest areas.
The fungus affects both cultivated and wild grasses. The most notable ones include wheat and rice. The pathogen was first detected among Brazilian wheat crops back in the 1980s. Ever since, the fungus has spread throughout South America and led to outbreaks and limited wheat production in certain regions.
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Is This Plant Pandemic?
Scientists warn that this fungal lineage could hit other areas and cause a "plant pandemic" of some sort. It may also lead to the development of worrisome traits, including fungicide resistance and the ability to impact other vital food crops. The New Food Magazine reports that this wheat blast fungus could lead to the total failure of crops.
In fact, in 2016, the first wheat blast outbreak in Asia was reported in Bangladesh. The researchers found out that the outbreak was linked to the fungus that spread across South America. After a couple of years, the fungus hit Africa for the first time. More specifically, it struck Zambian wheat crops. Nature notes that it is still unclear whether the fungus was from South America or Bangladesh.
To know the exact origins of the pathogen, the researchers looked into over 500 samples of M. oryzae to spot genetic markers. They performed genome sequencing on 71 isolated samples. The outbreaks in Zambia and Bangladesh were found to belong to distinct strains of the lineage that circulated across South America.
Such findings align with a preprint study that looked into the genomes of South American, Asian, and African samples of the wheat blast.
Hernán Burbano, a co-author of the study and an evolutionary geneticist from the University College London, says that this shows that the pathogen was moved around by people in some way.
Researchers consider seed imports as a possible cause for the outbreaks. Nature notes that Bangladesh acquired a huge number of wheat seeds from Brazil a year before the outbreak. However, these origins are still not established.
Tofazzal Islam, an ecological chemist from the Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman Agricultural University in Bangladesh, notes that researchers are capitalizing on genomic data to monitor how the wheat blast is spreading across Bangladesh. They are also utilizing the insights to breed resistant wheat crops.
Threats are also stressed by the genomic analysis. Though the fungus lineage could still be hampered by particular fungicides, these fungi could end up resistant due to mutations. The self-cloning strain may harbor new characteristics by mating with another M. oryzae.
Bruce McDonald, a plant pathologist from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Switzerland, says that efforts should focus on eradicating the pathogen in Zambia and Bangladesh. However, he is not sure about whether genomic surveillance will sufficiently slow down the global spread of the pathogen.
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