Dr Ian Dundas

Ian is originally an agricultural science graduate of the University of Queensland and investigated the Cytogenetics and crossability of the pigeonpea (Cajanus cajan) with its wild Australian relatives in Atylosia for his PhD. He then spent 2 years as an International Intern at ICRISAT in India.

Since the early 1990s he has been producing rust resistant wheat lines with shortened alien chromosome fragments by non-GM methods and providing them to wheat breeding programs. Together with Dawn Verlin, he is searching the wild relatives of wheat in the genera Triticum, Aegilops, Thinopyrum and Amblyopyrum for new resistance genes against stem, leaf and stripe rusts and providing them in suitable forms to wheat breeding programs around Australia and the World.  This research involves assessing genetic stocks generously provided by overseas donors, isolating the resistance gene to an alien chromosome, and transferring the alien chromosome segment carrying the resistance gene to a wheat chromosome by chromosome engineering.

Our research is part of the Australian Cereal Rust Control Program which also comprises the following institutions:

University of Sydney, Plant Breeding Institute: http://sydney.edu.au/agriculture/plant_breeding_institute/

CSIRO Agriculture: http://www.csiro.au/en/Research/AF/Areas/Plant-Science/Plant-diseases/Cereal-rusts

CIMMYT: http://www.cimmyt.org/

A listing of our research outputs of wheat lines carrying whole alien chromosomes or inserted alien chromosome segments with disease resistance genes are listed at the following link: http://www.agwine.adelaide.edu.au/research/germplasm/

• International Collaborations: Rust Research

The Cereal Cytogenetics Laboratory has recently been privileged to be part of the Borlaug Global Rust Initiative (http://www.globalrust.org/). The BGRI has undertaken a World-wide project to produce durable resistant wheat cultivars against pathotypes of the stem rust originally known as Ug99 (now TTKSK and 12 other related races).  Our stem rust resistant lines have been shared with wheat breeding programmes in the USA, Canada, Mexico, Uruguay, South Africa, Kenya, United Kingdom, Hungary, Iran, Syria, Turkey, Pakistan, India, China and Indonesia with the goal of protecting wheat crops from stem rust and ensuring the food supply of the World’s poorest people.

We are currently actively collaborating with researchers at the John Innes Centre (UK) on resistance gene cloning, and also with the University of Electronic Science and Technology (Chengdu, China), Sichuan Agricultural University (Chengdu, China) and Shandong Academy of Agricultural Science (Jinan, China) on marker development and chromosome engineering.

• National Collaborations: Rust Research in Wheat
  • Professor Robert Park, University of Sydney, Plant Breeding Institute, Cobbitty
  • Dr Peng Zhang, University of Sydney, Plant Breeding Institute, Cobbitty
  • Dr Harbans Bariana, University of Sydney, Plant Breeding Institute, Cobbitty
  • Drs Rohit Mago, CSIRO Plant Industry, Canberra
  • Dr Hugh Wallwork and team, SARDI, Waite Campus