Charcoal rot in sesame: infection biology, host resistance mechanism, and genomic-enabled strategies for durable resistance breeding.
Ali A, Nadeem MA, Ölmez F, Kurt C, Baloch FS
Crop Improvement
The sesame seeds in your tahini and hummus come from plants increasingly threatened by a soil fungus that grows more aggressive in exactly the hot, dry conditions climate change is delivering to sesame-growing regions.
Sesame plants are being devastated by a soil fungus that can survive in the ground for years and attacks hardest during heat waves and droughts. Scientists have mapped out how sesame plants try to fight back — thickening their cell walls, flooding themselves with protective chemicals — but the fungus is tricky and no single defense works perfectly. Researchers are now combining old-school breeding with cutting-edge gene-mapping and gene-editing tools to build sesame varieties tough enough to withstand both the disease and a warming climate.
Key Findings
Macrophomina phaseolina persists in soil for extended periods via microsclerotia and infects an exceptionally broad range of host plants, making crop rotation an unreliable control strategy.
Sesame activates multiple overlapping defenses against the pathogen — including cell wall reinforcement, phenylpropanoid pathway chemicals, and antioxidant responses — but variable heat and drought conditions make stable resistance difficult to screen for and maintain.
Genomic approaches including QTL mapping, genome-wide association studies, marker-assisted selection, and CRISPR gene-editing, combined with multi-omics data, offer the most promising route to durable resistance breeding at scale.
chevron_right Technical Summary
A comprehensive review examines charcoal rot, a soil-borne fungal disease threatening sesame production worldwide, and outlines how modern genomic tools combined with traditional breeding can produce climate-resilient, disease-resistant sesame varieties — especially critical as warming temperatures and drought intensify the disease.
Abstract Preview
Sesame (Sesamum indicum L.) is a globally important oilseed crop, but its production is constrained by charcoal rot, caused by the soil-borne fungus Macrophomina phaseolina. The pathogen's exceptio...
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