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Public release date: 27-Jun-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ] Contact: Eduard Akhunov eakhunov@k-state.edu 785-532-1342 Kansas State University MANHATTAN, Kan. -- The world's food supply got a little more plentiful thanks to a scientific breakthrough. Eduard Akhunov, associate professor of plant pathology at Kansas State University, and his colleague, Jorge Dubcovsky from the University of California-Davis, led a research project that identified a gene that gives wheat plants resistance to one of the most deadly races of the wheat stem rust pathogen -- called Ug99 -- that was first discovered in Uganda in 1999

Two genes that are resistant to fungal wheat disease may help ward off a growing epidemic of stem rust that threatens crops in Africa, the Middle East and beyond, researchers said Friday. International scientists have spent years trying to pin down the sections of the wheat genome that are resistant to Ug99, a pathogen that was first found to be killing wheat crops in Uganda in the late 1990s and has since appeared in Kenya, Ethiopia, Sudan, Yemen and Iran