WINNIPEG — Almost every one of the millions of distinct species that live on Earth has a natural enemy that will consume or destroy it if given half a chance.
That biological reality explains why Vladimir Vujanovic, a University of Saskatchewan microbiologist, was particularly excited when he discovered a fungus that could destroy one of the most devastating wheat diseases on the planet: fusarium head blight.
Vujanovic, who is Agri-Food Innovation Fund chair in agricultural microbiology at the U of S, discovered a novel organism in 2005 within a sample of fusarium graninearum, one of the fungi that causes fusarium head blight.
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Vujanovic eventually learned that the fungus, later named sphaerodes mycoparasitica, had a voracious appetite for fusarium.
“We observed that these organisms attach to the fusarium, penetrate inside, colonize, then absorb and kill the fusarium…. It’s (an) intercellular attack,” Vujanovic said during a break at the Canadian Workshop on Fusarium Head Blight in Winnipeg in late November.
After witnessing its aggressive assault on fusarium, Vujanovic realized there was an opportunity to capitalize on the behaviour of the novel mycoparasite, which naturally exists in Canada.
He spent a few years understanding the parasite and how it attacks fusarium, and in the summer of 2010 he let it out of the lab and took it to the field.
Vujanovic and his U of S colleagues conducted field trials at the university’s experimental fields and at Agriculture Canada’s research centre in Melfort, Sask.
They grew plots of wheat and barley infected with fusarium and treated some with the mycoparasite, either as a seed coating or applied as a foliar spray.
Vujanovic said the scientists were amazed by the results after calculating the yield gains, the percentage of fusarium head blight index and the amount of fusarium DNA on the wheat.
For instance, wheat treated with the mycoparasite yielded 37 percent more than a control wheat plot infected with fusarium. As well, the mycoparasite reduced the fusarium index by 61 percent and reduced the amount of fusarium DNA on the wheat by 89 percent, compared to a control plot.
Overall, the biological agent controlled fusarium and preserved yield as effectively as a fungicide.
“I believe that this is the huge advantage of this organism, that it is specific to the fusarium pathogen,” he said.
The organism ignores other microbes and attacks only fusarium.
The U of S filed a patent and signed a licensing agreement with Becker Underwood.
However, he said the biological control offers an opportunity to prolong the efficacy of fusarium resistant varieties by using the fungus in combination with the cultivar.
“Fusarium can overcome the resistance of cultivars in three to five years and we spend 10 years to develop a cultivar,” he said.
A commercial product might be a wheat variety coated with the mycoparasite, he added.
Jeannie Gilbert, an Agriculture Canada scientist who specializes in fusarium at the Cereal Research Centre in Winnipeg, said another opportunity is to spray the biological control on crop stubble infected with fusarium.
Such a treatment could greatly reduce the amount of inoculum on the crop residue and minimize the risk of disease development.
Fusarium costs farmers billions of dollars in lost production each year, and scientists in other parts of the world are monitoring Vujanovic’s progress at the U of S.
Vujanovic said cereal growers in Western Canada are also paying attention, following a fusarium epidemic in 2010.
“Farmers are the most interested. I’ve gotten a lot of calls directly from farmers, particularly in Alberta and Saskatchewan.”
Vujanovic said it’s difficult to know for certain when the technology will come onto the market because he
