TRAVEL FUND REPORT 1: 16th European Fusarium Seminar, Rome, Italy, 12th – 15th June 2023

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16^th European Fusarium Seminar, Rome, Italy

12^th – 15^th June 2023

I attended the 16^th European Fusarium Seminar (EFS16) at The Sapienza University of Rome, Italy and I am very grateful to have been awarded a BSPP travel grant in order to attend this conference. It was an excellent opportunity to hear about the latest research being conducted in many fields relating to Fusarium, including plant pathology, mycotoxins and disease control.

In addition to attending, I was also given the opportunity to present my research at the conference in the disease control and forecasting models session. I gave a 15 minute talk entitled ‘Molecular diagnostics to determine disease risk from Fusarium oxysporum’ which focussed on our research using molecular diagnostics (qPCR) to detect F. oxysporum formae speciales in soil and plant material to enable disease prediction in lettuce and onion.

The conference was very interesting, with many sessions on a range of Fusarium research. One of the main highlights of the conference was a keynote talk given by Prof Antonio Di Pietro, which discussed work on how transposon activity drives environmental adaptation in clonally evolving fungal pathogens such as F. oxysporum. It was fascinating to see how quickly transposon insertion into the genome appeared when pathogens are serially passaged through plants.

Another highlight was the epidemiology and population genetics session, and in particular the talks from Davide Spadaro on vascular wilt in lettuce and Anne D. Van Diepeningen on F. oxysporum f. sp. cepae in Dutch onion, as both of these talks are directly related to my current research area. It was interesting to discuss their work further during the lunch breaks and gain some new ideas on how I can progress in my own research.

In addition, there were some excellent posters from PhD students on display, including one of the student poster prize winners looking at the effect of F. graminearum infection in wheat on the survival of two species of aphid. I also enjoyed posters on Fusarium wilt in lettuce, Fusarium head blight in wheat and even Fusarium infections of the cornea.

This was my first international conference, and it was fascinating to hear about the exciting research happening in Europe and further afield. It has given me opportunity to present my research to a broad community of Fusarium researchers and has given me ideas for my own work in the future. I am very thankful to BSPP for providing the travel grant for my attendance at this conference.

Dr Sascha Jenkins

University of Warwick

Attending the conference, stood next to promotional banner