SCRI wins £1.8m grant for research

SCOTLAND'S leading rural research station is celebrating success with the award of more than £1.8 million for a number of projects that will lead to more sustainable crops and new more resistant varieties of soft fruit, potatoes and barley.

The Scottish Crop Research Institute won funding for five projects as part of the new approaches to crop protection funding competition. As a result, researchers from SCRI will work with a wide range of business partners.

Commenting on the awards, director and chief executive of SCRI, Professor Peter Gregory, said, "Our success at securing this funding underlines our position at the cutting edge of innovative research in the UK.

"These new projects will complement existing research at SCRI and allow us to come up with novel ideas and solutions to improve agricultural sustainability."

The barley disease Rhynchosporium costs growers in lost yield an estimated 7m annually despite fungicide applications valued at more than 25m. Previously much of the understanding of this disease came from visible symptoms but recent research has shown the importance of extensive growth of this pathogen before symptoms are visible.

The new project will identify, characterise and combine sources of barley resistance to improve durability and use knowledge of different defence mechanisms to improve crop protection strategies to increase the effectiveness of currently available fungicides.

Another project will examine plant-derived resistance to pests and diseases to see how these can best be deployed as part of integrated pest and disease management of soft fruit crops to reduce reliance on chemicals and still produce high quality fruit.

Free-living nematodes (FLN) are a major problem for UK potato growers costing an estimated 13m annually. Damage is caused directly by their feeding on roots and indirectly by transmission of tobacco rattle virus.

This project will develop a new diagnostic tool to identify direct feeding damage by FLN on crops and allow investigations into virus transmission.