Photo: Gerald Holmes

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BSPP News Autumn 2002 - Online Edition

Chinese Safari 

Four of us from Rothamsted (Bruce Fitt, John Lucas, Simon Foster and Jon West) recently enjoyed an unforgettable trip to China, where we experienced much generous hospitality from our hosts in Hefei, Wuhan and Beijing. 

The main purpose of our trip was to participate in a workshop in Wuhan, but Jon and Bruce started off in Hefei.  Our host, Professor Boa-Cheng Hu, kindly met us in Beijing on Monday 15 April and we fitted in a visit to the British Council (funding the trip) before the flight to Hefei.  There Jon gave a talk at the AAAS Crop Research Institute about cereal disease work at Rothamsted and we visited oilseed rape/sclerotinia field experiments.  Wet weather has produced severe epidemics of sclerotinia stem rot in oilseed rape and fusarium head blight in wheat in provinces bordering the Yangste River this year. Bruce received a Huangshang Friendship award from the Anhui Provincial Government (the Huangshang Mountains are a beautiful world heritage site in Anhui Province). The next day Boa-Cheng and his driver (Mr He) took us from Hefei to Wuhan along the new motorway (with its "Takeway" lane).  This journey provided us with an excellent opportunity to see farmers at work in the fields around their villages. Meanwhile John and Simon went straight to Wuhan and on up the Yangste River to see the beautiful Three Gorges and surrounding areas which will be flooded when the new dam becomes operational.

Huangshang mountain background as Bruce Fitt receives an award 
from the government of Anhui Province

The next day the workshop at the CAAS Oilseeds Research Institute started, under a big red banner in Chinese and English.  It was opened by the Institute Deputy Director (Guangming Li) and John, and Bruce received an Honorary Professorship.  We all gave talks which were translated into Chinese and Simon also ran a molecular diagnostic practical for the participants.  At the end, the workshop produced a declaration about strategies for preventing spread of the more aggressive A-group Leptosphaeria maculans (phoma stem canker of oilseed rape), which is predominant in Europe, North America and Australia, into China, where only the less aggressive B-group has been found.  Furthermore, Chinese oilseed rape culti-vars, grown over 10M ha, are highly susceptible to the A-group of L. maculans, and subsistence farmers have no recourse to fungicides.

The workshop featured on the provincial TV news and in four newspapers.  Between us, we also visited Huazhong (Central China) University of Science and Technology (which has a joint laboratory with IACR) and Huazhong Agricultural University.  Everywhere we received generous hospitality; John greatly improved his skill with chopsticks during the course of the visit.  On the Saturday morning our host in Wuhan, Professor Sheng-yi Liu, organised a trip to the Yellow Crane Tower, with its interesting history and excellent views over Wuhan, before we took our flight to Beijing.

Advertising John's China Agricultural University seminar

On the Sunday Jon went back to the UK, John and Simon visited the Forbidden City and Summer Palace with Sheng-yi and Bruce went to a packed church with Anmin Wan, then on to Anmin's in-laws for lunch in their apartment on the CAAS campus near our guesthouse.  In Beijing we were able to visit, between us, the CAAS Institute of Plant Protection, China Agricultural University, EU delegation, Chinese Ministry of Agriculture, CAAS Biotechnology Institute, CAS Institute of Genetics and AQSIQ Plant Quarantine Institute, to follow up on the Wuhan workshop declaration and establish new scientific contacts.  On our final day (Wednesday 24 April) Bruce visited the CAS Institute of Mathematics and his hosts kindly took us to the Great Wall.  On many days it had rained, but on that day we had brilliant sunshine!  It was a tremendous experience to walk along the wall, with its breath-taking views over rugged terrain, and stretching for some 7000 km!

We are grateful to the British Council (DFID) and our Chinese hosts for funding the trip, and to all those Chinese scientists who welcomed us so warmly.

Bruce Fitt, John Lucas, Simon Foster, Jon West
IACR - Rothamsted

Dr Roy Johnson

It is with great sadness that we have to report that Roy Johnson died on 31st July 2002. His death was caused by motor neurone disease which he had contracted just over a year previously.

 Roy was President of BSPP in 1991 and was an honorary member of BSPP. He was well-known internationally for his work on yellow rust of wheat and particularly for developing the concept of durable resistance. He led the rust research programme at the Plant Breeding Institute, Cambridge, then briefly at Unilever following part-privatisation of PBI, then at the John Innes Centre, Norwich. Following his retirement in 1995, he was an excellent editor of Plant Pathology.

 But those dry facts don't begin to sum up Roy for those who knew him. He was a marvellous colleague and friend (and cook and pianist and tennis-player and much more besides) and is sorely missed.

 An obituary will appear in Plant Pathology shortly.

Mother Cell:   Dr Sarah Gurr

Primary Germlings:

Dr Ziguo Zhang (BBSRC) - microarrays and gene silencing in Blumeria graminis

Dr Pushpa Chaure - microarray transformation in B. graminis

Secondary Germlings:

Keith Stewart (BBSRC and CASE SCRI) - mlo and gene expression
Gemma Priddey (BBSRC and CASE Aventis) - kinase signalling  appressorial differentiation in B. graminis

Emma Perfect (BBSRC and CASE Syngenta) - roles for the extra cellular matrix in signalling and adhesion

Catherine Henderson (BBSRC and CASE Syngenta) - oxidative stress signalling in B. graminis

 Zena Robinson (research assistant)

Monday

Checked on the plants after the weekend, all very happy and infected. Spores Galore!

Off to work, setting up the never-ending scoring experiments. As Sarah says, it may be boring but there's data from scoring! 

Coffee conversations gave a chance to discuss the week ahead and the forthcoming sporulation event (Zena is soon to give birth to twins). It seems quieter without Keith, who's hard at work on his Wain Fellowship at Risø, Denmark.

Back to the microscope to see how the spores are doing. Fun-filled afternoon trying to make Excel behave. 
Ziguo stuns us with his ideas for exciting new techniques in the week's lab meeting. Pushpa groans! We discuss the potential for gene silencing in Blumeria graminis. 

Tuesday

Gemma looks smug about her Magnaporthe; brandishing petri-dishes overflowing with tissue. Meanwhile Catherine and Emma spend hours hoovering up Blumeria graminis spores in the greenhouse to get just half an eppendorf-full. Working with an obligate biotroph is frequently quite a challenge!

Gemma spends all morning grinding her copious amounts of tissue (risking frostbite in the name of science) ready for her afternoon of genomic DNA extractions. Will she have transformed the Magnaporthe pmk1 mutant with the Blumeria graminis homologue? Watch this space ..

Wednesday

Catherine spends the morning pipetting to prepare her semi-quantitative RT-PCR reactions (risking RSI for the plant pathology cause). Are those genes regulated over the first twenty hours of B. graminis development? Then it's Catherine's turn to pot up, inoculate the plants, and keep the greenhouse in order. 

Thursday

Emma impersonates Kylie with her 'spinning' experiments. She keeps fit by running from one side of the department to the other to infect her slides, centrifuging them, before counting the number of spores remaining. Just how sticky are those spores? Watch out Pritt-Stick there could be competition!
The weekly departmental seminar reminds us that there are organisms other than fungi in the world. 

Friday

Experiments are put on hold to make way for Oxford's first Plant Microbe Interactions day, organised by Dr. Gail Preston. A diverse collection of talks were presented and enjoyed. Perhaps this will serve to both initiate and reinforce collaborative links between different departments. 

We leave the department after a busy week (we do work more than one day a week each!). We get on well as a lab and as part of our lab socialising we're off to our weekly salsa lesson - so there'll be competition for the dance floor at the next BSPP conference!!