Fighting fungus to protect food supply
RESEARCH | A scientist at UD is waging an important battle to help protect a major resource in the world’s food supply from a devastating fungal disease known as rice blast.
Nicole Donofrio, assistant professor in the Department of Plant and Soil Sciences, says the disease affects foods on which many developing countries depend—particularly rice, but also rye, wheat, barley and other members of the grass family.
“The general statistic is that rice blast kills enough rice each year to feed 60 million people,” Donofrio says, calling that “a number we definitely cannot afford, particularly in the face of the rapidly expanding world population.”
Her work focuses on the complex nature of the interactions between the plants and fungal pathogens in trying to understand how certain fungi take advantage of a plant’s “inner workings” to grow and reproduce. When the fungus that causes rice blast gets inside a plant, it sucks the nutrients out of the cells. After several days, lesions appear on the leaves in a diamond shape.
“These disease symptoms give the disease its name because the leaf eventually looks like it’s been ‘blasted’ with some sort of gun,” Donofrio says.
People who grow rice rely on both fungicides and what is known as host resistance, or strains of crops developed to resist the disease, but rice blast disease evolves quickly, overcoming these host resistances as well as the fungicides.
“Typically, a resistance line of rice only lasts a couple years out in the field before the fungus’ genome changes to overcome this resistance, and infects its host once again,” she says. “It is very exciting to be in such a challenging and important field of research.”
