“A new experimental study has identified a novel genetic locus in a common agricultural weed, Elymus repens, that provides significant resistance to the destructive fungal disease Fusarium Head Blight (FHB) and has now been successfully transferred into wheat to produce FHB resistant hybrids…

Dr. Yinghui Li and Houyang Kang’s research team’s new study, published in the Journal of Experimental Botany, outlines how they successfully hybridized E. repens and cultivated wheat to transfer FHB-resistant genes from E. repens into the wheat.

When testing for the presence of FHB from deliberately infected plants, hybrid genotypes containing the resistance genes, labeled as 1StL, showed a 69% reduction in diseased plant spikelets under greenhouse conditions compared to the control wheat, and a 60% reduction under field conditions.”

From Phys.org.