CEREAL SMUT RACES AND THEIR VARIABILITY

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Abstract
The study of physiologic specialization in cereal smuts, excluding bunt of wheat, involved subjecting 2880 smut collections and selected subcultures to pathogenicity tests on differential varieties of host plants. The results of these tests showed that (a) a smut collection may consist of a pure strain but more frequently of mixed or heterozygous strains; (b) repeated passage of a variable culture through selected hosts occasionally yielded a stable strain which may be called a race; (c) the majority of variable cultures continued variable through ten generations of selection. Covered smut of oats was the least variable; covered smut of barley, loose smut of oats and false loose smut of barley were progressively more variable. No stable strain or race has been isolated in the flower-infecting loose smut of wheat and of barley. Preliminary results of selfing some of the variable smut cultures indicate a possibility of obtaining races stable for pathogenicity on the differential hosts.

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