Blackleg’s genetic secrets revealed

Agriculture Canada researchers have made a breakthrough likely to help canola growers manage one of their biggest disease threats.

Researchers have sequenced 162 races of the blackleg pathogen that are prevalent in Western Canada and with that knowledge they hope to provide growers with new tools for better managing the disease.

Blackleg was first detected in a field in northeastern Saskatchewan in 1975.

It quickly became the most damaging canola disease on the Prairies in the 1980s and 1990s with yield losses of up to 50 percent reported in some fields.

Canola varieties with high levels of resistance to the disease were introduced in the early 1990s but by the late 1990s the pathogen was starting to overcome that resistance.

The incidence and severity of the disease has been on the rise in the last decade.

But breeders should be able to create lines with more robust resistance now that scientists have sequenced 162 strains of the pathogen and have a better understanding of its genetic variability and population structure.

“They will be able to get a more in-depth vision of how the pathogen is evolving in different parts of the Prairies,” said Doug Heath, research manager with the Saskatchewan Canola Development Commission.