NURTURING A RESILIENT EARTH
Protecting food from pathogens
By: Liz Do & Alison Rutka
24 Oct, 2023
The effects of climate change can be felt globally at an alarming rate. CIFAR is at the forefront of addressing it. This special series, Nurturing a Resilient Earth, takes a closer look at how CIFAR’s community — across borders, roles and disciplines — is making a meaningful impact to bring about powerful change.
Learn how extreme weather events and rising temperatures are poised to create deeper global food inequalities and what CIFAR researchers like Sarah Gurr are doing about it.
Want to learn more about their research?
Watch: CIFAR Talks: Nurturing a Resilient Earth featuring researchers from the series.
Photo by England Studios
As the climate change crisis worsens, global weather events and rising temperatures have the potential to damage and destroy crops around the world, threatening global food security and exacerbating food inequality.
Sarah Gurr, fellow in CIFAR’s Fungal Kingdom: Threats and Opportunities, is researching how the global movement of fungal infestations affects the world’s crop supply — this data gives her unprecedented insight into the effect of environmental changes on food security.
Gurr and her team of researchers are monitoring pathogen movement from multiple sources. Pathogens, she notes, are migrating for various reasons. For starters, the presence of genetically uniform crops brought about by the Green Revolution are mutating and becoming resistant to widely used fungicides. Global trade and transport are also influencing the movement of crop pests and pathogens, particularly fungi.
Climate change also plays a significant role. Rising heat and humidity are influencing the movement of pathogens globally, in unexpected and undesirable ways. Not only are climbing temperatures, particularly in the northern hemisphere, driving the movement of fungi on crops, notes Gurr, but increased humidity is also giving way to episodes of dramatic weather.
“Dramatic weather is very pertinent for Canada. After a recent tornado in America, upon the tornado winds to Canada came some spores that have never been seen before on wheat,” says Gurr.
Pathogen migration at large scale has the potential to wreak havoc on the world’s food supply. All of today’s major crops — rice, wheat, corn (maize), soybeans and potatoes — are susceptible to fungal disease.
“Wheat, maize, and rice cover 40 per cent of global agricultural land important for the production of calories. Even though we can protect a crop like rice for example, to some degree against fungicides, we're still losing between 12 to 23 per cent of the crop each year to disease,” explains Gurr.
Pathogen migration as a result of climate change is also accelerating the levels of food inequality globally. Gurr explains that as the temperatures increase, the ability to grow crops decreases, particularly among hotter regions along the equator. Compound that with population growth over time and the result is crop demand outstripping supply.
Gurr is working to build predictive models of disease migration affecting crops around the world that will help researchers understand how and when pathogens might impact the world’s food supply. The good news is the pathogen movement can be predictable. The modelling is complex. Current models are derived using known fungal data, paired with temperature profiles for fungi growth, temperature and humidity information, and predictive analysis from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and are tested against real field data. The results are striking.
“What we can see with climate change is that pathogens are going to move forward. We've shown that they're moving about eight kilometers per year,” says Gurr. “The pathogens will eventually catch up with the crops. This is going to radically change cropping systems in the U.S., Europe, and China, for example. We're going to see a complete mixing of pathogens in the world.”
Gurr and her team are focused on numerous approaches for combating threats of the fungal kingdom. CIFAR researchers are exploring gene editing of crops in an effort to build disease resistance. They’re also developing new antifungals to better protect crops against fungal disease. In a 2022 article in Nature, Gurr and her colleagues published research demonstrating new antifungal compounds that offer protection to cereals against diseases like septoria tritici blotch and rice blast.
Reversing these predictions is possible, but it will require accelerated interdisciplinary research to bring diverse areas of expertise together. That is why organizations like CIFAR and its strength in bringing diverse, brilliant minds together, is such a difference maker, says Gurr.
She points to researchers like Hailing Jin, a fellow in the Fungal Kingdom program, who is working on controlling plant disease through RNA interference between plant and fungal pathogens. “When it comes to finding solutions, this is where I can draw in people from CIFAR — because it’s a brilliant team,” says Gurr.
“My work as part of CIFAR's Fungal Kingdom program makes me consider my research in new ways,” adds Gurr on the organization’s impact on advancing her research. “Discussions with my CIFAR colleagues have led to a series of work projects aimed at better understanding the movement of fungi in a warming world and changes in their virulence patterns. This work has the potential to forward solutions which might increase food security globally."
How does CIFAR help you do impactful work to address climate change?
“Discussions with my CIFAR colleagues have led to a series of work projects aimed at better understanding the movement of fungi in a warming world and changes in their virulence patterns. This work has the potential to forward solutions which might increase food security globally.”