NSERC Awards $400,000 to Explore New Approach to Fungal Disease Control in Canola

Posted May 18, 2004


FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE - May 18, 2004 2004-05-31-AR

NSERC Awards $400,000 to Explore New Approach to Fungal Disease Control in
Canola

Armed with $400,000 in federal funding, University of Saskatchewan chemistry
professor Soledade Pedras is striking a path into uncharted territory in an
effort to help crops such as canola and cabbage protect themselves from
devastating fungal diseases.

Pedras is one of an elite group of 15 Canadian researchers awarded an
Accelerator Grant for Exceptional New Opportunities from the Natural
Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC). These grants are once
in-a-lifetime funds intended to back outstanding new and daring ideas that
have great potential for a major breakthrough.

Her targets are biotrophic fungi, a class of organisms that includes cabbage
clubroot and white rust in canola, a disease that can cut yields by more
than 20 per cent. Almost nothing is known about the biochemistry of these
diseases largely because these organisms can only survive on living plants
and cannot be grown in culture. This makes them extremely hard to study.

If Pedras and her team can unravel their secrets, the knowledge could be
used by geneticists and plant breeders to develop resistant plants.
Chemists, including those in her own group, could also use it to develop
products to boost the plants' own defense mechanisms to fight off disease.

"This research promises to fill a significant gap in our knowledge of plant
disease," says U of S Vice-President Research Steven Franklin. "This
foundation work could have broad implications both for plant science and the
agricultural economy."

Pedras and her team will focus on how biotrophic fungi infect plant cells
and change attack and defense programs. In the process, the plant cells are
killed.

From her work with necrotrophic fungi (those that kill and feed upon dead
tissue), she suspects there are biochemical pathways that favour biotrophic
fungi as well. Necrotrophic fungi include canola diseases like blackleg and
stem rot, and are relatively easy to culture in the lab.

Understanding the biochemical pathways of biotrophic fungi could be the key
to controlling the diseases.

"The question is, what is happening during this cycle?" Pedras says. "What
sort of metabolic processes are occurring and can we manipulate them? Can we
design chemicals that can stop these processes, and in fact act
synergistically with the plant defenses?"

The group has already coined a term for these designer chemicals --
paldoxins, for "phytoalexin detoxification inhibitors." Phytoalexins are the
substances plants use to fight off fungal infection, but some fungi - the
ones that cause disease - have learned how to neutralize or detoxify these
defenses.

Ideally, Pedras envisions products tailor-made to defend a specific plant
from a specific pathogen, with little damage to non-target organisms. The
best case scenario would have these products developed by a Saskatchewan
biotech company.

But before any of this can happen, the initial research must be done to
illuminate a dark corner of the plant disease knowledge base, with no
guarantee it will yield results.

"I've worked many years at the bench, and my experience is always that if
there is really a hard project, the harder it is, the better the results
will be," Pedras says. "There will be more novelty. If it was easy, it would
already be well-known."

The NSERC grant will pay for two graduate students and two post-doctoral
fellows and the tools they need to conduct the work.

NSERC (www.nserc.ca) is Canada's largest science granting agency.

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For more information, contact:

Soledade Pedras
Department of Chemistry
University of Saskatchewan
(306) 966-4772
soledade.pedras@usask.ca

Michael Robin
Research Communications
University of Saskatchewan
(306) 966-2427
michael.robin@usask.ca
www.usask.ca/research