Several 7-day old seedlings will be inoculated with B. graminis tritici and scored after 11 and 16 days. As sufficient seeds become available, transgenic families of plants also will be tested for resistance to Cephalosporium stripe and take-all. All data will be analyzed to determine their statistical significance. The transgenic plants expressing tlp gene from rice and hval gene from barley will be tested for drought and salt resistance as described by Xu et al. It is estimated that roughly half of stress-related loss is due to diseases or insects.
Fungal infections are the major factors contributing to yield loss due to diseases.
In addition, fungal diseases such as scab and Kamal bunt adversely affect grain quality and marketability and have been described as industry-threatening diseases. A measure of the success of this project will be comparison of the disease resistance rating of the genetically engineered varieties with the parental varieties used for the generation of transgenic plants. These comparisons will be made in greenhouse trials. The economic value of these lines cannot be measured until they are used in breeding programs to develop new wheat cultivars for Kansas.