Arable farmers, researchers and agronomists are invited to a webinar on Thursday 26 March, to learn about the new LLS-ERASED project and ways to get involved.
Funded by Defra’s Farming Futures R&D Fund and managed by Innovate UK, LLS-Erased is a three-year £2.5m multi-partner project looking to improve genetic resilience against light leaf spot (LLS).
LLS has become the number one disease threat to UK oilseed rape, with yield losses estimated to have risen from £94m in 2017 to more than £300m in 2022. Despite widespread fungicide use, control has become increasingly unreliable as pathogen populations evolve and resistance to azole fungicides spreads. At the same time, currently available varieties struggle to offer strong, durable resistance.
LLS-Erased aims to tackle that by delivering oilseed rape varieties with significantly reduced susceptibility to light leaf spot, developed using precision-breeding techniques that accelerate the introduction of beneficial traits without introducing foreign DNA.
Crucially, the project will move these traits beyond the laboratory and into farmer-led field trials on commercial farms, supported by real-time disease forecasting and decision-support tools.
“It will bring precision-bred oilseed rape technology to farms for the first time. Combined with risk forecasting and a new decision support tool, it will offer risk-based and data-driven LLS control,” explains BOFIN founder Tom Allen-Stevens.
At the heart of the project is a newly identified plant susceptibility gene. By switching off this gene using precision breeding, researchers have shown it is possible to reduce the ability of the light leaf spot pathogen to infect the crop, offering a more durable form of protection than traditional resistance genes that pathogens can quickly overcome.
The science is being led by the John Innes Centre and the University of Hertfordshire, working alongside ADAS and Scottish Agronomy to integrate the new trait into practical, farm-ready disease-management strategies.
A key element of the project is collaboration with US-based Cibus (NASDAQ: CBUS), whose Rapid Trait Development System (RTDS), a suite of technologies including non-transgenic processes, enables precise genetic edits to be introduced directly into elite breeding lines with scale and speed, dramatically shortening the time needed to bring new traits to market.
The webinar will run from 8.30-9.30am. To find out more and register for the webinar, visit https://tinyurl.com/OSRwebinar
