Progress towards wheat varieties with resistance to fusarium head blight

Many breeders are urgently trying to improve genetic resistance to fusarium head blight. Within a set of 17 varieties tested in 4 countries resistance seems to be stable across pathogen species and location and a reduction in disease appears to result in a proportional reduction in deoxynivale (DON) content. Breeding is a compromise between achieving improvements in yield, quality and resistance and many characters are technically difficult to handle, sometimes making progress slow. New technology is likely to increase the efficiency of this process and we hope to see better resistance to fusarium head blight in Europe within the next 10 years.