Saskatoon, Saskatchewan
December 4, 2002

The bleak Fusarium Head Blight (FHB) picture just got brighter for Prairie wheat growers grappling with this costly fungal disease.

A new wave of future wheat varieties coming out of Western Canadian breeding programs shows a significant boost in FHB resistance, says Dr. Anita Brûlé-Babel, who co-manages the FHB disease nursery for wheat at the University of Manitoba's research farm near Carman, Man. The nursery is the region's main screening facility for evaluating how new wheat lines stand up to the disease. It is a collaborative project involving several research institutions across the Prairie and is supported in part by farmers through Western Grains Research Foundation (WGRF).

"We noticed a higher proportion of promising material in the nursery this past year, which indicates the breeding programs are making good progress," says Brûlé-Babel, a wheat breeder, geneticist and professor at the university. "This is a very challenging disease and the improvements are incremental, but what we're seeing bodes well for having material with much greater Fusarium resistance in farmers' hands over the next five-to-ten years."

With the large economic losses FHB represents, every degree of improvement means significant savings for the industry, she says. Over the past decade, wheat yield and quality downgrading losses to the disease in Canada have been estimated in the ballpark of $1 billion, with the high moisture eastern prairie bearing the brunt of those losses.

The wheat FHB nursery began in 2001 to dramatically improve screening for FHB response and allow for faster delivery of FHB-resistant wheat varieties to western farmers. The nursery was located in an area of high infection to avoid introducing the disease to new areas.

The FHB nursery is a labour intensive operation that uses a complex system of misting, innoculation and evaluation to test wheat lines under a worst-case scenario for disease infection. In 2002, researchers evaluated nearly 10,000 wheat lines. They were compared with a handful of check varieties, with varying levels of FHB resistance. Checks included the susceptible varieties AC Morse, AC Vista and Glenlea, a line with an intermediate reaction to FHB, AC Cora, and the resistant FHB 37, an experimental line that lacks other key traits required for registration.

"Compared to last year, we saw a lot more material that is close to the resistant check," says Brûlé-Babel. "Overall, we have a large amount of material looking better than the susceptible checks and are starting to see many lines that are comparable or better than the intermediate check."

The nursery itself also saw significant progress in screening volume, she says. The number of lines screened was doubled from 5,000 in 2001 to 10,000 in 2002, and testing for the most advanced material was increased from two to three replications.

"We're now up to our targeted maximum for lines screened," says Brûlé-Babel. "Our plan was to take around 5,000 lines first year and double that in second year once we had things running smoothly. The added replication for the most advanced material is another important step, because this is such a difficult disease to evaluate - the more replications you have data for, the more confident you are in
getting a sense of whether material is going to hold up or not."

The FHB disease nursery has also played a role in evaluating an American wheat variety that has shown good FHB resistance. Alsen, a variety developed by North Dakota State University, is undergoing further testing for Canadian quality standards and could be available to producers in 2004 if granted approval by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency.

The FHB disease nursery for wheat is a collaborative effort between researchers from the University of Saskatchewan Crop Development Centre, Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada and the University of Manitoba. In addition to WGRF, the nursery is supported by the Saskatchewan Agriculture Development Fund and Manitoba's Agri-Food Research and Development Initiative (ARDI).

The Wheat and Barley Check-off Fund, administered by Western Grains Research Foundation, allocates over $4 million annually to wheat and barley breeding programs. WGRF Funding for the FHB nursery for wheat comes from interest earned on its Wheat Check-off Reserve Fund. The Reserve Fund is set up to maintain Check-off funding in the event of a major crop failure. The WGRF Board, comprised of producers representing 17 diverse agricultural organizations, decided to use a portion of the interest on this Reserve Fund to support the nursery, as a natural complement to the main breeding effort.