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Wheat leaf rust, caused by Puccinia triticina Eriks., is of worldwide concern for wheat producers. The disease has been an annual problem for Canadian wheat producers since the early days of wheat cultivation in the 1800s, and research focused on combating this disease began in the early 1900s. Significant progress was made towards understanding the epidemiology of wheat leaf rust and developing genetic resistance in many countries worldwide. This review paper focuses exclusively on the research and development done in whole, or in part, in Canada. An integrated approach to controlling wheat leaf rust consisted of research in the following areas: the early research on wheat leaf rust in Canada, breeding and commercialization of high quality rust resistant wheat cultivars, discovery and genetic analysis of leaf rust resistance genes, the population biology and genetics of the P. triticina/wheat interaction. This review summarizes the research in each of these areas and the connections between the d...

Cereal rust fungi are pathogens of major importance to agriculture, threatening cereal production worldwide. Targeted breeding for resistance, based on information from fungal surveys and population structure analyses of virulence, has been effective. Nevertheless, breakdown of resistance occurs frequently and continued efforts are needed to understand how these fungi overcome resistance and to determine the range of available resistance genes. The development of genomic resources for these fungi and their comparison has released a torrent of new ideas and approaches to use this information to assist pathologists and agriculture in general. The sequencing of gene transcripts and the analysis of proteins from haustoria has yielded candidate virulence factors among which could be defence-triggering avirulence genes. Genome-wide computational analyses, including genetic mapping and transcript analyses by RNA sequencing of many fungal isolates, will predict many more candidates. Functional assays, such as leaf infiltration using Agrobacterium for delivery of cloned fungal effectors, are being developed. This will allow the screening of wheat germplasm for novel resistance genes for breeding. Comparative analyses have also revealed fungal virulence genes, providing fungal targets for disease control in host-produced RNAi approaches.

Gene-associated simple sequence repeat (SSR) markers were developed for Puccinia triticina through the data mining of existing EST libraries. Analysis of 7134 expressed sequence tags (ESTs) from cDNA libraries of P. triticina detected 204 EST-SSRs with a minimum of 12 repeating nucleotides. The majority of EST-SSRs contained short di- or tri-nucleotide repeats. These EST-SSRs were evaluated on 35 P. triticina isolates collected in Canada and 21 EST-SSRs were polymorphic and informative in determining intraspecific genetic diversity. A comparison of virulence and EST-SSR genotypes showed a strong correlation between virulence to Lr2a, Lr2c and Lr17a and EST-SSRs genotypes. The differentiation of the P. triticina population based on EST-SSR genotypes was comparable to that obtained with genomic SSRs, despite differences between two types of SSR markers. Eight of the 21 EST-SSRs produced the cross amplification in Puccinia coronata and Puccinia graminis, suggesting that EST-SSRs are more applicable ...