THE SAME technology used to help control the devastating Zika and Ebola viruses in humans may be used to stop wheat rust epidemics, which can have catastrophic impact on crops.
Big data, together with a mobile sequencer, will be used to give a rapid diagnosis of crop samples.
The sequencer is known as a MinION and weighs just 100g.
It can be plugged into a laptop, effectively creating a supremely portable ‘laptop laboratory’ and can give diagnostic results quickly.
This speedy turnaround will be critical in getting on top of rust epidemics.
Rust is renowned for spreading quickly and often by the time an outbreak is identified it can be too late to control economically.
“A rust epidemic is like a forest fire,” said Dave Hodson, project lead and senior scientist with the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT).
“You’ve got to have early detection and early control,” he said.
The sequencing project will be funded by a $US100,000 ($A128,000) grant from CGIAR, formerly the Consultative Group for International Agricultural Research, as part of a project into the use of big data in agriculture.
A specialist in the field believes sequencing can make a major difference in terms of diagnostics.
Diane Saunders, from the John Innes Centre in the UK, said the technology that was used to track both Zika and Ebola virus strains could be put to use looking at plant pathogens as well.
Stripe rust in wheat, recognised globally as the most damaging of the rust strains, will be the first focus of the study.
The disease, also known as yellow rust, can cause crop damage of up to 80pc, with one study estimating losses globally from the disease at a whopping 5.47 million tonnes.
The project is aiming to be more nimble in terms of making accurate diagnostics.
Cereal pathologists are concerned at the ability of the fungal diseases to mutate, with new stem rusts strains such as Ug99 emerging, along with the devastating new stripe rust found in Ethiopia in 2010.
Currently, wheat rust pathogen diagnostics can take months and sometimes up to a year to get results. Only a limited number of samples can be analysed by specialised labs using controlled greenhouse seedling tests.
Using the mobile sequencer, scientists will be able to get results much quicker.
“For the first time we hope to get diagnostics directly from the field within a just few days of sampling, then we feed that into the early warning systems we’ve already got running,” Dr Hodson said.
“This has the potential to revolutionise our diagnostics and early warning” he said.
Big data will play a critical role in the success of the project according to Dr Hodson.
He said having access to the huge data sets and analytics developed by the John Innes Centre is a crucial component, saying the field pathogenomics used required a huge amount of genome sequence data, along with sequences representing all the genetic groups of rust.
“This is a huge data set, but it is essential to the correct diagnosis of the specific rust strain.”