Activities
Development of rice blast disease control technology through characterization of rice blast fungus and rice cultivars in Kenya: Assoc. Prof. Daigo Makihara
Rice blast is one of the most destructive rice diseases in Kenya, where outbreaks have occurred in some irrigated paddy fields. What these blast affected areas have in common is that a single rice cultivar has been continuously grown at a large scale. Consecutive cultivation of a single rice cultivar for several seasons may cause a rice blast outbreak, due to the emergence of pathogenic races of the rice blast fungus that are able to infect the rice cultivar. The objective of this project is therefore to develop a coping technique to rice blast disease, through (1) collecting rice cultivars and clarifying the cultivation system, (2) collecting rice blast isolates and the clarifying pathogenic races, (3) characterizing Kenyan rice genotypes for blast resistance, and (4) evaluating blast resistance in rice lines introduced with blast resistance QTLs.
 Field close up of rice panicles severely damaged by rice blast disease (West Kano, Kenya) |