Devastating wheat fungus appears in Asia for first time

On 26 April, a team led by microbial population geneticist Daniel Croll, who is at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, reported on github.com that the Bangladeshi wheat-blast strain is closely related to those collected in Brazilian wheat fields and on nearby weeds. His team’s analysis, which uses the data on the website Open Wheat Blast, reveals that the sample is not closely related to known rice-blast-causing strains of M. oryzae.