Crop scientist one of Nature’s finest

Australian plant scientist Dr Peter Dodds has been named as one of five crop researchers who could change the world by Nature magazine.

Dodds, a molecular biologist at CSIRO Plant Industry in Canberra, investigates resistance genes to the rust fungus Puccinia graminis in wheat.

He has worked on identifying avirulence proteins expressed in the haustoria of rust and how these tentacle-like filaments enter the host cell, where they suck out all the nutrients.

Understanding the interaction between avirulence proteins and host resistance genes will hopefully allow scientists to confront a new strain of rust that is threatening world wheat supplies called Ug99.

The aim is to identify a number of resistance genes from plants and engineering new crop varieties containing a number of them.

The other four scientists featured are Jerry Glover, an agroecologist from the US, who works on turning wheat into a perennial rather than annual plant, which would greatly reduce fertiliser use and help control soil erosion; Zhang Jianhua, a plant physiologist at Hong Kong Baptist University who has developed a method called partial root zone drying in which some roots are watered and others are not, which is being trialled by wine growers in Australia; renewable fuels researcher Richard Sayre of the US, who is working on turning algae into biofuel and collaborating on the BioCassava Plus collaboration, which is hoping to turn cassava into a nutrient-rich superfood; and Julian Hibberd, a molecular biologist from Cambridge University in the UK who is studying how C4 plants can supercharge photosynthesis and whether this can be applied to rice.

“Five crop researchers who could change the world” appears in today’s issue of Nature.