@gurcharn.bsky.social
Assistant Professor, Wheat Breeder & Geneticist at University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada Affiliate Assistant Professor, The University of British Columbia (UBC), Vancouver, Canada
My stellar MSc student John Hubensky fabulously defended his thesis! 🎉
His research taught us about TPPs & their role in drought tolerance, & genetics of spike development.
Thanks @NSERC_CRSNG @SaskWheat @mb_cropalliance for the funding & @westerngrains for scholarship to John.
The work paved path for testing many other hypotheses. Shoutout to Samuel Holden & Meng Li who led the work with significant contributions from our collaborators. Last but not the least, shoutout to our funders - Genome BC
NSERC, SaskWheat SaskBarley, Alberta Grains, Manitoba Crop Alliance, WGRF.
We present first ever haplophased genome of barley stripe rust + an evidence for likely somatic hybridization event in Psh. Interestingly, Psh isn't much different from Pst & the difference is similar to what we find b/w two diverse Pst lineages+we found genes that makes Psh, Psh & not Pst. 3/5
25.10.2025 20:20 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0
My intuition from my MSc stripe rust work & what I hypothesized in 2018 - here we proved that I was right:
PstS18 - the most predominant stripe rust lineage in North America-is a somatic hybrid of PstS1 (former most predominant lineage that was introduced from east Africa around year 2000). 2/5
🌾A good day for cereal rust community!
Thrilled to share our 5 yrs of work with revolutionary discoveries on wheat & barley stripe rust fungi + we present the most comprehensive genomic resource (54 haploid genomes) ever developed for any wheat rust fungi.
1/5
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
