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Dudutech awarded funding for beans research from Agri-Tech Catalyst Fund Round 5

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Project title: Improving consistency of yields and quality of large-scale and smallholder bean production in Kenya by precision management of soil, water and pathogens

The fresh vegetable industry forms a vital part of Kenya’s economy. Kenyan growers export around 60,000 tonnes of fine and runner beans each year, worth £385M at retail sales value, with the UK receiving around 50% of the supply. A consortium made up of Flamingo Horticulture – Dudutech Division, Provenance Partners Ltd (UK), Vegpro Ltd (Kenya), NIAB EMR (UK) and WeatherQuest Ltd (UK) received funding for 3 years as part of the UK’s Agri-Tech Catalyst scheme. The project will deliver new science, technology, knowledge and training to accelerate sustainable intensification of large- and small-scale bean production in Kenya. Work on the project, which started in October 2016 and is to be completed by September 2019, focusses on:

  1. Developing and adapting irrigation infrastructure, scheduling tools and weather probability forecasting to improve soil water management, yields and consistency of quality;
  2. Quantifying the effects of soil water availability and continuous cropping on the incidence and severity of soil pathogens targeting bean crops;
  3. Identifying the effects of novel biocontrol agents on the soil/rhizosphere microbiome to guide the optimum combination of treatments;
  4. Adopting integrated biocontrol to improve yields, quality and shelf-life;
  5. Promoting and disseminating the benefits of precision irrigation and biocontrol via outgrower workshops led by Vegpro and Dudutech;
  6. Assessing the economic and social impacts of project outputs and developing and implementing extension services to outgrowers.

At the end of this project, the consortium expect to deliver a 12% increase in average yield and a 20% reduction in wasted crop, in order to increase food and job security and enhance soil management skills among Kenyan growers.

How nematodes ‘customise’ the crops they eat

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Invisible to the naked eye, nematodes that parasitize plants are a huge threat to agriculture, causing billions of dollars in crop losses every year.

New research shows that these tiny worms use a specialized hormone to help them feed from the plant—a finding that could one day lead to crop plants with enhanced resistance to these devastating agricultural pests.

“Cell cycle regulation is a key aspect of plant development and one of the first events altered during the formation of the feeding sites nematodes use to acquire nutrients from host plants,” says Melissa Goellner Mitchum, a researcher at the Bond Life Sciences Center and a plant sciences professor at the University of Missouri.

“These discoveries led scientists to suspect that cytokinin, a hormone that promotes cell division in plants, might play a key role in feeding site formation for nematode parasites.”

Doctoral student Carola De La Torre and postdoctoral fellow Demosthenis Chronis worked with Mitchum to determine if nematode infection alters the cytokinin signaling pathways plants use to regulate growth and development and how the process changes due to nematode infection.

“As part of our research, we examined the activation of different components of the cytokinin pathway in response to nematode infection,” De La Torre says. “Also, we evaluated numerous plants that lacked the presence of these components and found that most of these plants were less susceptible to nematode infection.

“These results suggested to us that these little worms are not only utilizing parts of a plant hormonal pathway that is important for plant growth and development, but they also are doing it in a way that allows them to cause disease.”

Mitchum’s team worked with Florian Grundler’s group at Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-University of Bonn, Germany, who further analyzed the connection between cytokinin and nematodes. Using advanced genetic tools, they discovered that nematodes create their own form of plant cytokinin and that, by secreting the hormone into the plant, they actively control the cell cycle leading to the production of ideal feeding sites to support their development.

These findings show the ability of an animal to synthesize and secrete a functional plant hormone to establish long-term parasitism.

“Understanding how plant-parasitic nematodes modulate host plants to their own benefit is an essential first step in finding new technologies needed to develop crop plants with enhanced resistance to these devastating agricultural pests,” Mitchum says.

Source: Sheena Davis for University of Missouri