Improved Disease Resistance on the Way – One Key to Soybean Improvement

As spring planting season begins, it is difficult to predict those diseases that may be most problematic during the growing season of 2008. So much depends upon rainfall, temperature and a myriad of other factors that can affect crops and pathogens. This includes potential for resistance to various pathogens. Despite all the management practices we talk about, disease resistance remains one of the most practical and economic ways to control plant disease. But, sometimes the genes that confer that resistance are not so easy to find. Iowa State University scientists, in research that would not have been possible without support by soybean check-off dollars, have recently been working to develop a means to find and characterize resistance genes to pathogens when resistance has been difficult to find