SCAB may have met its match. Also called fusarium head blight, the wheat disease causes billions of dollars worth of damage. It also produces toxins that cause diarrhoea, vomiting and other symptoms.
To boost the effectiveness of three natural antifungal proteins, Yu-Cai Liao of the Huazhong Agricultural University in Wuhan, China, and his team fused genes for each of these proteins with the gene for a fragment of a chicken antibody that binds to the fusarium.
Thale cress modified to make any one of the three combination proteins were highly resistant to a fungus similar to the one that causes…
