ERC Starting Grant · 2022
Defusing mini-chromosomes—the Achilles’ heel of the wheat blast pandemic
PANDEMIC is an ambitious high-risk/high-gain program to deliver an innovative pathogen-guided strategy for crop disease resistance. The wheat blast pandemic is a clear and present danger to global food security. It is caused by the blast fungus, Magnaporthe oryzae, which, after emerging in Brazil only ~35 years ago, has spread over the last 5 years to Southeast Asia and Africa. We discovered that all isolates of the pandemic wheat blast fungus belong to a single, asexual clonal lineage. These pandemic isolates carry a supernumerary mini-chromosome (mChr) of ~2 Mb, which encodes 19 secreted effector (virulence) proteins and renders the pandemic lineage highly virulent. We propose that this…
From the public funding record at EU CORDIS. Describes the funded project, not the reviews below.