Study Shows Air Pollution Directly Linked To Wheat Pathogen - Nature

[hatrack]

"An investigation spanning some 160 years of data has shown how air pollution is linked to plant diseases. The study reveals that industrial emissions directly affect which microbes attack wheat.

Each year, US wheat farmers lose some US$250 million as a result of damage caused by the fungus Mycosphaerella graminicola. And European farmers spend about US$400 million annually on fungicides to control the spread of this pathogen and Phaeosphaeria nodorum, which similarly hits crop yield. Over the course of the past century, European farmers have seen P. nodorum become more prevalent, and the once dominant M. graminicola fall into the background. This switch baffled plant scientists, who struggled to explain what had happened. Now, a team of researchers believes it understands the reason for this change.

An archive of British wheat samples that was started in the autumn of 1843 provided the key to the puzzle. Researchers extracted and sequenced the DNA in this plant matter and measured the pathogens present over the past 160 years.

They then looked at environmental factors that may have influenced the spread of wheat diseases. The team expected to see the prevalence of P. nodorum increase in tandem with rising temperatures due to global warming. But to its surprise, the pattern correlated most strongly with changes in air pollution, rather than the knock-on effect of temperature. "This is the first paper in which you can clearly link, over a long timescale, the population dynamics of two pathogens to changes in environmental pollution," says plant pathologist and team member Bart Fraaije of Rothamsted Research in Harpenden, UK."

EDIT

http://www.nature.com/news/2005/050404/full/050404-1.html

[NNadir]

1. I'll bet this gets ignored.