Wheat Rust Surveillance: Field Disease Scoring and Sample Collection for Phenotyping and Molecular Genotyping

Abstract

Long-distance migration capacity, emergence of invasive lineages, and variability in adaptation to a wide range of climatic conditions make wheat rusts the most important threat to wheat production worldwide. Efficient and coordinated efforts are required for surveillance of the pathogen population at different geographical levels to enable tracking of rust pathogen populations at local, regional, continental, and ultimately worldwide scale. Here we describe a standard procedure for rust surveillance to enable comparison across various research groups for a final compilation. The procedure described would enable tracking of disease severity, field level expression of host resistance, and collection of samples for further virulence phenotyping and molecular genotyping.

Keywords: Disease epidemics; Rust pathogens; Tracking populations.