Sustaining Barley Webinar Series | Building Resistance

Sustaining Barley Webinar Series

Building Resistance

January 21, 2027 @ 1 pm CT

Speakers:

Matthew Bakker | University of Manitoba, Department of Microbiology | Associate Professor

Presentation: "Malt quality traits are impacted by a broad spectrum of Fusarium species"

Dr. Matthew Bakker is an Associate Professor of Microbiology, and was previously a research scientist with the United States Department of Agriculture. He has been studying fusarium head blight for 10 years, including through biological control, connections to the microbiome, fungicide resistance, plant cell wall degrading enzymes, and biological transformation of trichothecene mycotoxins. Although most Fusarium-related issues in barley and malt are often assumed to be due to Fusarium graminearum, a range of Fusarium species can be found associated with barley. We tested each of six distinct Fusarium species for their impacts on malt quality parameters, demonstrating that multiple Fusarium species can contribute to diverse impacts on malt quality. Importantly, measuring DON content of incoming grain will not be informative about the risk of quality issues resulting from non-DON-producing species.  

Rebecca Spanner | University of Minnesota | Postdoc Associate

Rebecca Spanner is currently a Postdoctoral Associate working in the lab of Brian Steffenson in the Department of Plant Pathology at the University of Minnesota. She is interested in developing and utilizing genomics resources of important phytopathogenic fungi to study the evolution of virulence and other traits that are important for the development and management of crop disease. Her current research focuses on cereal rust pathogens. 

Eric Nazareno | Oregon State University | Assistant Professor

Eric Nazareno is currently an assistant professor of cereal pathology at Oregon State University. He works on several diseases of wheat that are relevant to the Pacific Northwest cropping systems, including stripe rust, Septoria tritici blotch, Fusarium crown rot, and Cephalosporium leaf stripe. He was formerly a postdoc at the University of Minnesota where he worked on barley leaf rust and other rusts affecting cereals. His overall research goal is to understand how pathogen populations change and use that knowledge to develop and deploy genetic resistance.

Joint presentation: "Barley Leaf Rust: Pangenomics, Global Diversity, and Genetic Resistance."

This presentation will talk about our recent work on developing haplophased genomes of P. hordei and the global diversity of barley leaf rust. We will also present our work on screening barley germplasm and gene postulation studies, including the development and testing of KASP markers for Rph genes.