May 2, 2016. If Open Sharing Of Data Is A Great Idea For Combatting A Dangerous Plant Disease, Why Not For All Human Diseases? A techdirt post by @glynmoody.
May 3, 2016. Wheat Blast, Bangladesh, and Biosecurity. USDA press release about the outbreak.
May 3-5, 2016. Click here to read @namraf64 and @PetrusGladioli reviews of Castroagudin et al. “Wheat blast disease caused by Pyricularia graminis–tritici sp. nov.” bioRxiv preprint. The main issues are whether the concatenated 10 gene genealogies is consistent with genome-wide analyses, and the level of discordance between the examined genes.
May 4, 2016. Quartz India: “A contagious disease is destroying wheat fields in Bangladesh, and scientists are afraid of it spreading.” by Akshat Rathi.
May 4, 2016. Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog describes Open Wheat Blast as “a veritable tour-de-force of international collaboration in pathogenomics.” They further comment: “Let’s see if the breeders are as fast and open with their international collaboration as the pathologists. Stay tuned.”
May 5, 2016. Emerson Del Ponte posts 6 talks and 26 posters presented at the 2nd wheat blast workshop in Brazil on April 9. Great to see more reports and data in the open domain.
May 5, 2016. Pierre Gladieux, INRA, UMR BGPI, Montpellier, France, and colleagues post on Open Wheat Blast a report “Phylogenomic analyses reveal that the 2016 outbreak of “wheat blast” in Bangladesh is caused by a South American wheat-infecting lineage of Magnaporthe oryzae.” They conclude: “The nesting of Bangladeshi samples within Brazilian wheat-infecting populations suggests a possible introduction in Bangladesh from a source in South America, which is the only continent where wheat-infecting populations of Magnaporthe oryzae have been reported.”
Immediate independent replication is another advantage of open science.
May 7, 2016. Wheat Blast covered by India’s Business Standard: “Wheat Blast at India’s doorsteps, govt says no need to panic.”
