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New, Disease Resistant Sunflower
Available By Jan
Suszkiw
May 11, 2004
Sunflower breeders seeking new "ammunition" against the
fungus Sclerotinia sclerotiorum can now find it in three new
disease-resistant germplasm lines dubbed "RHA 439," "RH 440" and "HA 441."
Scientists with the Agricultural Research
Service and North Dakota State
University at Fargo and Carrington, N.D., cooperatively developed, tested
and released the germplasm lines.
Sclerotinia causes two diseases in sunflower--stalk rot
and head rot. During peak years, such as occurred in 1999, outbreaks of the two
diseases in U.S. sunflower crops can cause $100 million in losses.
Sclerotinia head rot occurs less often than stalk rot, but it's just as
destructive. Sunflower heads infected with the disease can disintegrate before
their seed can be harvested.
New commercial cultivars bred from the resistant sunflower lines
should suffer far less damage from the fungus, according to Tom Gulya, a plant
pathologist at the Sunflower Research
Unit, part of ARS' Red River
Valley Agricultural Research Center in Fargo.
In nursery trials there and in Carrington, the average incidence
of head rot disease that the scientists observed in the three germplasm lines
was 16, 33 and 8 percent, respectively, for RHA 439, RH 440 and HA 441. This
compared to 58 percent for four commercial cultivars used for comparison.
Gulya and Jerry Miller, a geneticist at the Sunflower Research
Unit, used conventional breeding techniques to develop the sunflower lines'
improved resistance to head rot. Although the seed yields compared well with
those of the commercial cultivars, the germplasm lines aren't intended for
stand-alone use. Breeders seeking to develop new cultivars from them will also
have to incorporate high oleic acid content and other agronomic traits that
growers need.
Read more
about this research in the May issue of Agricultural Research
magazine.
ARS is the U.S. Department of
Agriculture's chief scientific research agency. |
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