Last week a group of seventeen rust pathologist from KALRO and Dream Team Agro Consultancy Limited took part in a one-week workshop to equip them on the use of a real-time plant diseases diagnostics surveillance for wheat rust diseases.

Dr. Diane Saunders, a group leader at John Innes Centre (JIC) and Dr. Dave Hodson, a plant pathologist at CIMMYT led the workshop held at KALRO Njoro aimed to train Kenyan researchers on MARPLE (Mobile and Real-time Plant disease) diagnostics.

In Kenya where susceptible varieties are grown, both stem and yellow rust are critical and often cause significant yield losses threatening wheat production globally. The John Innes Centre (JIC) together with CIMMYT is working closely with partners in Kenya to introduce new technologies and best management practices to combat rust diseases.

“MARPLE will be an important tool to help identify yellow rust races rapidly and inform expeditious deployment of the right wheat varieties to the farmers’ field.” Commented Dr. Dave Hodson.

Normally Kenyan researchers would have to send samples out of the country for sequencing but this have changed. Sequencing is now happening at KALRO Njoro.

Dr. Saunders noted, “We did a MARPLE diagnostics pipeline, extracting DNA from yellow rust samples collected by KALRO Njoro in two days. This would otherwise have taken months. The workshop has opened up new exciting possibilities for researchers in Kenya to provide local genome sequencing capacity that is currently absent.”

After the training, a MARPLE mobile lab remained at KALRO Njoro to allow researchers to conduct strain level genetic diagnostics and generate critical data for immediate integration into early warning systems.

Image Credit: Matt Heaton, JIC