The blackleg family has a bunch of brothers, but two really stand out.
One is a big bully, which often beats canola to a pulp.
The other is a saintly type that protects the weak and helpless.
A University of Manitoba researcher hopes to turn the saintly brother into the permanent protector of canola.
“They compete with each other, and one is a killer,” said plant pathologist Abdelbasset El Hadrami.
By exposing canola plants to the harmless blackleg before the killer appears, El Hadrami hopes to kick the plant’s immune system into action before danger appears.
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“It’s like a vaccine,” he said of his idea of inoculating canola crops with a weak blackleg race to make them immune to the dangerous race.
“We inoculate them with a pathogen that doesn’t do anything to the plant.”
El Hadrami helped organize a recent international conference on polyphenols held in Winnipeg.
Polyphenols are compounds produced inside plants that fight against stresses. They are produced to fight disease attacks and environmental stresses, such as drought, heat, excessive light and shade.
El Hadrami’s project began this year and he hopes to develop blackleg control methods that move beyond the relatively simple steps with which he’s now experimenting. Right now he’s hoping to show that canola crops exposed to the harmless blackleg race will withstand the killer race.
However, over the three years of the project he hopes to find out exactly what it is in the harmless variety that triggers the canola plant to produce its protective compounds. That way, a method could perhaps be developed to introduce only a small part of the disease to the crop to trigger the immune response.
He’s also hoping to figure out which compounds offer immunity to the killer race of the disease.
“We’re looking at how those compounds are linked,” said El Hadrami.
“Are they directly killing the pathogen or are they just forming a barrier across where the penetration happened?”
As his experiments progress, El Hadrami hopes to find ways to trigger blackleg immunity that farmers could apply in commercial conditions.
“Hopefully by the third year we’ll be able to tell what it is, synthesize it, and find a way that it can be sprayed or applied,” he said.
