A study of crown rust resistance in historical and modern oat cultivars representing 120 years of Polish oat breeding

• Published in: Euphytica 2020, Vol.216 (1), Article 12
• Main Authors: Sowa, Sylwia, Paczos-Grzęda, Edyta
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Biomedical and Life Sciences; Biotechnology; Crown rust; Cultivars; Disease resistance; Disease susceptibility; Genotypes; Health aspects; Immune response; Infection; Infections; Life Sciences; Plant breeding; Plant Genetics and Genomics; Plant growth; Plant Pathology; Plant Physiology; Plant Sciences; Puccinia coronata avenae; Seedlings
• ISSN: 0014-2336; 1573-5060
• DOI: 10.1007/s10681-019-2545-8

The objective of this paper was to measure resistance to Puccinia coronata f.sp. avenae (Pca) in a set of 63 previously uncharacterised new and historical oat cultivars representing 120 years of Polish oat breeding. The distinctiveness of the obsolete and modern gene pools led to the expectation that the earlier cultivars could be a valuable source of useful resistance genes discarded during subsequent breeding. The plant material was tested at the seedling stage using 14 Pca pathotypes and at the adult plant stage under natural infection conditions in 3 years of field observations. In all, 23 genotypes displayed an immune response to at least one Pca pathotype in the test at the seedling stage, however, most of them were susceptible to crown rust infection in the field. The most resistant, presenting immunity to 9 out of 14 P . coronata isolates, was Celer. The infection profile of this cultivar corresponded to the pattern of reference line Pc39. An allelism test confirmed that the resistance of both the Pc39 line and Celer is conditioned by either the same locus or by tightly linked genes. The infection analysis also demonstrated that some of the newest cultivars (Elegant, Komfort and Harnaś) showed a relatively high level of resistance in each year of field trials, despite being completely susceptible at the seedling stage. Further research will be required to evaluate the source, durability and suitability of this resistance. The study did not find any novel resistance to crown rust in the historic cultivars. However, results provide a new insight into adult plant stage resistance in Polish modern cultivars. The resistance of these cultivars is the result of many years of selection in breeding programs and provides an excellent base for future work.