PANACEA: Pathogenomics for enhancing food security in East Africa

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SummaryCommon bean is an essential source of nutrients, vitamins and minerals to approximately 300 million consumers worldwide. Pest and disease, such as angular leaf spot (ALS) caused by Pseudocercospora griseola, can seriously reduce yields and quality, leading to malnutrition and lost incomes. Farmers often rely on growing resistant varieties to combat the effects of disease but unfortunately ALS is genetically diverse, so selecting the best-performing varieties can be problematic. Providing resources for pathotyping fungal pathogens like ALS can help researchers and plant breeders to improve disease management, variety selection and guide the development of new, resistant varieties to help growers to stabilise productivity and to reduce the incidence and severity of disease outbreaks. The pump-priming project will help to establish new, innovative biological and bioinformatics resources that will provide local experts and researchers with enhanced capability to accurately monitor for differences in ALS races. This will enable new or novel pathotypes to be identified when arise, and if they pose a potential threat to a growing region, allowing for interventions to be made in good time. The resources will comprise of:i) An initial pathogen collection of 75-100 P. griseola isolates sampled from across the nine different Ugandan agro-ecologiesii) Genomic resources developed around the panel providing genotyping information for pathotyping and functional studiesiii) A population diversity screen using the new genomic resource to begin to shed light on ALS pathotypes affecting East African bean cropsiv) Series of meetings, webinars and workshops to optimise the new resources for end-user utility and demonstrate the new resource to stakeholders and local experts.The new resources will begin to facilitate improved monitoring and surveillance of P. griseola the causal agent of ALS on common bean in order to help prevent future disease outbreaks and to guide variety selection and the breeding of new varieties. This will contribute directly to stabilise yields and productivity, enhancing nutritional intakes and incomes for small-holder farmers and the millions of consumers dependent on common bean as a cheap, nutritious source of food. The resources will also have wider application to scientific researchers with interests in more fundamental aspects of pathogen genomics and epidemiology. The initial framework developed during the project could be applied to other crops/pathogens to support further improvement efforts.