What's in the crown rot breeding pipeline?

Just finished a phase of pre breeding, which is effectively breeding for the commercial breeding companies. So this is where we go and look for sources of resistance in either wild relatives of wheat or landracers from overseas, or actually develop the resistance to bring the resistance in from, from cultivars from overseas and then make them more agronomically adaptable to the region. At the same time, the material that we've passed on to the breeding companies is making its way through the breeding cycle and will hopefully make it into growers paddocks in the next seven or eight years. Resistance really looks at the ability of a plant to stop the pathogen from either infecting or restrict its invasion through the plant. And the classic examples of these are the rusts. So resistant wheat cultivars to rust can stop the pathogen from reproducing and therefore experiencing yield loss. Tolerance, on the other hand, is more of a physiological response of the plant in a general sense that allows the plant to escape any yield loss. So it will still become infected, it still will show symptoms, but you don't experience the yield loss to the same extent as you would an intolerant variety. I suppose the thing with crown rot though is you're never going to get that absolute resistance. There's no such thing as a plant that, to use layman's terms, is immune to crown rot. Just the way that pathogen works, it's a very intricate pathogen that can live in the host and actually not cause any damage in those dry years, just the way it interacts with the plant. So we're always going to need to look for those partial sources of resistance and also that tolerance so that the plants can escape the yield loss in those tough years. It's been a significant investment in some work when it was a national crown rot management project led by Stephen Sinfendorfer, based out of Tamworth, doing a lot of work on that management side, looking at crop rotations, at operations between crops, things like inter row sowing, nitrogen management, weed management, fallow in disease breaks and in crop. The key to this new phase of the GRDC investment in pre breeding is it's really brought together a number of institutions, so University of Southern Queensland, which was previously the team working out of dafq, the Queensland government at Lesley Research Centre and also csiro. So we're all coming together now, working under the one banner, to our strengths. So. So one of the strengths here at the PVI is that we're in the grain belt. We're in an environment that certainly gets crown rotten and we can manage our trial sites to generate the highest degree of crown rot in any given year.