"This is a new discipline that seeks to predict pathogens that will affect crops, as is already done in human health with the flu vaccine," said CRAG researcher Ignacio Rubio-Somoza, who will be in charge of a scientific meeting to address the issue, to be held on 3 and 4 September in Barcelona.
The meeting, convened by BDebate, an initiative of Biocat and Obra Social "la Caixa", has been presented as "the birth of personalised agriculture;" a new agrogenetic discipline to predict diseases that will affect crops and choose crop varieties able to resist new pathogens.
According to Rubio-Somoza, the research efforts "aim at identifying the defence mechanisms naturally present in plants and understanding how these are determined by a specific genetic profile."
By combining this information with the genetics of the enemies they have had to face during their evolution, researchers hope to find crop varieties that are resistant to future pests.
This approach would contribute to preventing devastating events, such as the one experienced in Ireland in the middle of the 19th century, when potato plants were affected by a fungus and a million Irish people died of hunger, and those who survived emigrated massively, especially to the United States.
Scientists say that this new knowledge can help create new vegetable varieties on demand.
For example, if the type of infectious agent that will appear, as well as the amount of rainfall of that season are predicted, scientists will be able to design a new plant variety that will resist those threats.
Rubio-Somoza pointed out that although some of the plants that can benefit more quickly from these advances are tomatoes, wheat, corn, lettuce and other commonly consumed vegetables, experimental tests are being carried out also with the "queen of the lab", the Arabidopsis thaliana; a cruciferous species that is present in the five continents.
Scientists argue that apart from helping develop preventive strategies for the preservation of the health of plants, these new technologies will also bring a cleaner and more efficient agriculture, and therefore also more environmentally-friendly.
"The advances made in this field of research will make it possible to reduce the use of pesticides and other chemicals that now have a high impact on the environment. There is nothing more innocuous than not having to treat the crops with anything," stressed Rubio-Somoza.
According to the researcher, this new field of research is born, in large part, thanks to the democratisation of genomic sequencing methods.
Researchers retrieve ancient DNA from collections, herbaria, tools found in the sites and other sources in order to develop an evolutionary record of pathogens and plants and see how they have changed over the past centuries.
"The pathogens could be cyclical and could be repeated in history," according to Rubio-Somoza. "Recovering ancient genetic material is like opening a grave."
The meeting to be held on 3 and 4 September in Barcelona will be attended, among others, by the director of the Department of Molecular Biology of the Max Planck Institute (Germany), Detlef Weigel, who is studying how plants and pathogens adapt to changes in the environment and is trying to learn about the genetics and mechanisms that fuel these adaptations.
Source: Efe Agro
