Speed Breeding to Combat Wheat Disease with Drs. Nidhi Rawat and Vijay Tiwari

Field, Lab, Earth

“Evaluation of speed breeding conditions for accelerating Fusarium head blight and deoxynivalenol screening in wheat” with Nidhi Rawat and Vivek Tiwari.

Fusarium head blight (FHB), also known as head scab, is one of the most significant diseases affecting wheat, causing substantial economic losses for farmers in the U.S. and worldwide. While FHB resistant wheat lines have been identified, breeding these traits into desirable cultivars is a time-consuming process that can take decades, with uncertain success. In the U.S., particularly for spring wheat, crossing of wheat lines can typically be done only once per year due to seasonal limitations, which slow down the process of development of disease-resistant cultivars. To overcome this challenge, speed breeding—an approach that involves growing plants under extended light exposure (20–22 hours per day) to accelerate their life cycle—offers a promising solution. This technique enables multiple generations of wheat to be produced within a single year, allowing for more frequent crossings and a faster transfer of disease resistance traits into desirable cultivars. In this episode, Drs. Nidhi Rawat and Vijay Tiwari share their insights on using speed breeding techniques to accelerate the breeding of disease-resistant cultivars.

Tune in to learn:

· What is Fusarium head blight?

· How does Fusarium head blight cause economic loss to farmers?

· What is speed breeding?

· How does speed breeding help in developing disease resistance cultivars?

· What are challenges in adopting speed breeding?

If you would like more information about this topic, this episode’s paper is available here: https://doi.org/10.1002/csc2.21226

This paper is always freely available.

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If you would like to reach out to Nidhi Rawat and Vijay K Tiwari, you can find them here: [e-mail] and [e-mail]

If you would like to reach out to Saptarshi Mondal from our Student Spotlight, you can find him here: [e-mail] https://www.facebook.com/saptarshi.mondal.50

Resources

CEU Quiz: https://web.sciencesocieties.org/Learning-Center/Courses/Course-Detail?productid=%7B3F0BF240-4700-F011-BAE2-0022480989AC%7D

Transcripts: Coming soon

US Wheat and Barley Scab Initiative (USWBSI): https://scabusa.org/home-page

Plant Science and Landscape Architecture, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742

https://agnr.umd.edu/about/directory/plant-science-landscape-architecture/

Wheat labs, University of Maryland, https://umdwheatgenomics.weebly.com/

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