Adaptation of French Wheat Leaf Rust ( Puccinia triticina ) Populations to Triticale
Abstract
Triticale (×Triticosecale), a wheat-rye hybrid first cropped in the 1960s, was initially renowned for its high resistance to biotic stresses such as leaf rust (Puccinia triticina) and has contributed to improving wheat cultivars from the 1980s onward. However, since the 1990s, with the rise in large-scale cultivation in some regions of Europe favouring pathogen adaptation, susceptibility of triticale to leaf rust has increased and it has become a significant threat in major production areas like France. The mechanisms behind this pathogen adaptation being unclear, we conducted a comparative assessment of the virulence spectrum and race structure of P. triticina populations collected from triticale and bread wheat. Comparative infection assays on wheat and triticale differential lines and genotyping assays to determine whether current epidemics are due to specialized races originating from wheat, revealed significant differences in population and race structure and a notably high level of triticale resistance to P. triticina. Thus, triticale continues to be a valuable asset for breeding wheat disease resistance, provided newly identified resistances are used carefully to ensure their sustainability. Despite the relatively marked genetic isolation between wheat and triticale populations, we detected a few isolates sampled on triticale with interaction profiles typical of bread wheat isolates, advocating for joint sustainable management of disease resistance in bread wheat and triticale.
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BibTeX
@article{delestre2026adaptation,
title = {{Adaptation of French Wheat Leaf Rust ( Puccinia triticina ) Populations to Triticale}},
author = {Ghislain Delestre and Thierry Rouxel and Annaig Bouguennec and Corentin Picard and Anne‐lise Boixel},
journal = {Plant Pathology},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.1111/ppa.70195},
url = {https://hal.inrae.fr/hal-05802968v1},
note = {CC BY-NC-ND 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - JOUR
TI - Adaptation of French Wheat Leaf Rust ( Puccinia triticina ) Populations to Triticale
AU - Ghislain Delestre
AU - Thierry Rouxel
AU - Annaig Bouguennec
AU - Corentin Picard
AU - Anne‐lise Boixel
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/16
JO - Plant Pathology
DO - 10.1111/ppa.70195
UR - https://hal.inrae.fr/hal-05802968v1
AB - Triticale (×Triticosecale), a wheat-rye hybrid first cropped in the 1960s, was initially renowned for its high resistance to biotic stresses such as leaf rust (Puccinia triticina) and has contributed to improving wheat cultivars from the 1980s onward. However, since the 1990s, with the rise in large-scale cultivation in some regions of Europe favouring pathogen adaptation, susceptibility of triticale to leaf rust has increased and it has become a significant threat in major production areas like France. The mechanisms behind this pathogen adaptation being unclear, we conducted a comparative assessment of the virulence spectrum and race structure of P. triticina populations collected from triticale and bread wheat. Comparative infection assays on wheat and triticale differential lines and genotyping assays to determine whether current epidemics are due to specialized races originating from wheat, revealed significant differences in population and race structure and a notably high level of triticale resistance to P. triticina. Thus, triticale continues to be a valuable asset for breeding wheat disease resistance, provided newly identified resistances are used carefully to ensure their sustainability. Despite the relatively marked genetic isolation between wheat and triticale populations, we detected a few isolates sampled on triticale with interaction profiles typical of bread wheat isolates, advocating for joint sustainable management of disease resistance in bread wheat and triticale.
SN - 0032-0862
SN - 1365-3059
ER -