A team of Agricultural Research Service and university scientists released two new oat germplasm lines to shore up the crop’s defenses against the devastating fungal disease called crown rust. The team specifically created the oat lines so that they could be crossed with elite commercial varieties to fortify them with new genetic sources of resistance to crown rust. The disease can be a plague upon oats worldwide and inflict grain losses of up to 50 percent in unprotected crops. The crown rust fungus is a genetically diverse pathogen and highly adept at evolving into new virulent forms called races. This can happen so quickly that the average productive life of an oat variety with seedling resistance is between three and five years, necessitating the use of chemical fungicides in conventional production systems. The sturdy oat lines have been propagated for their seed, which is available for a variety of development programs.
