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Plant disease

Underground life for rice foe

Nature volume 431, pages 516–517 (2004)Cite this article

We still have much to learn about the world's chief disease of rice — rice blast. That's clear from the finding that the culprit not only infects aerial plant tissues but can also invade roots like a typical root pathogen.

The diverse fungi that threaten the world's food crops are generally divided into those that infect plant structures above the ground and those that infect roots. Fungi that attack aerial plant structures use a few characteristic developmental pathways, and root-invading fungi — including symbiotic species that can be beneficial to plants — use different developmental routes. The rice blast fungus, which causes an annual loss of hundreds of millions of tonnes of rice worldwide, has become a model system for studying the aerial attack pathway. But, in a ground-breaking report that bridges the divide between the pathogenic lifestyles, Sesma and Osbourn1 show that the foliar blast pathogen also invades roots, using a typical root-specific pathway (page 582 of this issue).

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Figure 1: Fungal targets.

References

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  1. the Department of Plant Pathology, Kansas State University, 4024 Throckmorton Plant Sciences Center, Manhattan, 66506-5502, Kansas, USA

    Barbara Valent

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  1. Barbara Valent
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Valent, B. Underground life for rice foe. Nature 431, 516–517 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1038/431516a

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