Latest Fusarium ear blight Stories

April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Imagine a hot summer day, sitting in the cheap seats at your favorite baseball park. You have your hot dog, your giant foam finger, and a beer. Does life get any better than this? Can scientists build a better beer? An international consortium of scientists believes so, and they have been mapping the genome of barley to help produce new and better varieties, vital for the beer and whiskey industries. Their results have been published...

Climate change is likely to make plants more vulnerable to infectious disease, which will threaten crop yield and impact on the price and availability of food. Dr Adrian Newton, presenting his work at the Society for General Microbiology's Spring Conference in Harrogate, explains how exploiting diversity in crops is the best option to improve food security in a changing climate.Pest and disease management has helped double food production in the last 40 years, but 10-16% of the global harvest...

Individual kernels of wheat and barley can be quickly evaluated for resistance to a damaging scab disease by using near infrared light (NIR) technology, according to a U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) study conducted in support of a program to safeguard these valuable grain crops.NIR light is partially absorbed by the kernels, creating a type of "fingerprint" scientists can use to detect fusarium head blight, also known as "scab," or its related mycotoxin, called...

Asian wheat may offer novel genes for shoring up the defenses of U.S. varieties against Fusarium graminearum fungi that cause Fusarium head blight (FHB) disease.According to Agricultural Research Service (ARS) plant molecular biologist Guihua Bai, the FHB resistance found in today's U.S. wheat varieties is primarily based on the Chinese wheat variety Sumai 3 and a few other sources. But there's concern that FHB-causing species of F. graminearum will overcome these resistant sources. In...