Breeding oat for resistance to the crown rust pathogen Puccinia coronata f. sp. avenae: achievements and prospects

Crown rust, caused by Puccinia coronata f. sp. avenae (Pca), is a significant impediment to global oat production. Some 98 alleles at 92 loci conferring resistance to Pca in Avena have been designated; however, allelic relationships and chromosomal locations of many of these are unknown. Long-term monitoring of Pca in Australia, North America and elsewhere has shown that it is highly variable even in the absence of sexual recombination, likely due to large pathogen populations that cycle between wild oat communities and oat crops. Efforts to develop cultivars with genetic resistance to Pca began in the 1950s. Based almost solely on all all-stage resistance, this has had temporary benefits but very limited success. The inability to eradicate wild oats, and their common occurrence in many oat growing regions, means that future strategies to control Pca must be based on the assumption of a large and variable prevailing pathogen population with high evolutionary potential, even if cultivars with durable resistance are deployed and grown widely. The presence of minor gene, additive APR to Pca in hexaploid oat germplasm opens the possibility of pyramiding several such genes to give high levels of resistance. The recent availability of reference genomes for diploid and hexaploid oat will undoubtedly accelerate efforts to discover, characterise and develop high throughput diagnostic markers to introgress and pyramid resistance to Pca in high yielding adapted oat germplasm.

Virulence of Oat Crown Rust in Brazil and Uruguay

Race-specific resistance to crown rust, the most important disease of oat (Avena sativa) in Bra-zil, often fails within a few years of use in Brazilian cultivars. Virulence of 144 isolates of Puccinia coronata from cultivated oat in Brazil in 1997 to 1999 and 36 isolates from Uruguay in 1994-95 and 1998 was tested on a set of 27 oat crown rust differentials lines, each with a different Pc gene for race-specific resistance. Frequencies of virulence and mean virulence complexity were compared among these five collections from Brazil and Uruguay as well as with mean virulence complexity for a collection of 17 isolates from cultivated oat in western Siberia in Russia. Virulence-avirulence for each of the 27 Pc genes was polymorphic in both Brazil and Uruguay. Virulence frequencies were similar for collections from Brazil in 1998 and 1999 and for the collection from Uruguay from 1998, but there were large differences between the 1997 collection and the 1998 and 1999 collections from Brazil. Mean virulence complexity in both Brazil and Uruguay was greater than reported in the United States and much greater than in the Russian collection of P. coronata. A large number of races of P. coronata were found, with no more than five isolates of any race found in a single year in Brazil or Uruguay. The high virulence complexity and great diversity of virulence polymorphisms in Brazil and Uruguay make it unlikely that race-specific resistance can be effective there even though the South American populations of P. coronata are apparently entirely asexual.

Electron ionization mass spectral fragmentation of deoxynivalenol and related tricothecenes

Careful analysis of the electron impact (EI) mass spectral data obtained for the trimethylsilyl (TMS) ethers of known trichothecene mycotoxins of the deoxynivalenol group permitted the construction of a database useful for the identification of these mycotoxins directly from a gas chromatography/mass spectrometry (GC/MS) run. Structures of the ions at m/z 103, 117, 147 and 191 were elucidated by high-resolution mass spectrometry (HRMS) and a fragmentation scheme was suggested. The relative abundances of these ions in the mass spectra of the trichothecenes allowed a fast structural diagnosis during analysis of biological matrices. A new mycotoxin of this group, 3-acetylnivalenol, was tentatively identified by using MS data interpretation only.

Hierarchical cluster analysis as a tool to manage variation in germplasm collections

The potential of using hierarchical cluster analysis to classify entries from a germplasm collection according to their degree of similarity was assessed. Results suggest that similarity is generally greatest among individual entries by country of origin and that hierarchical cluster analysis could be used as a tool to classify entries from germplasm collections according to their respective gene pools, even when no passport data are available. Based on this technique, it is also shown that the segregative potential of entries can be estimated.

Descriptive cataloging of serials: the National Library of Medicine versus the Library of Congress

Descriptive cataloging practices for serial differ significantly in some respects between the Library of Congress and the National Library of Medicine. This paper compares some of these differences and indicates the impact they can have on the development of on-line cooperative data bases such as OCLC. Attention is also given to the possible impact of the second edition of the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules on serials cataloging. The need for standardization is stressed.