BluGen - the Blumeria Sequencing Project

Welcome to the website of the Blumeria Genome Sequencing Consortium. Blumeria graminis f. sp. hordei is a powdery mildew fungus which infects barley, in temperate regions it can reduce crop yields by as much as 40%.

Other powdery mildew fungi that are closely related to Blumeria are responsible for infections of squashes, legumes, strawberries, grapes, roses, apples and oak trees. Taken together, powdery mildews cause greater losses in terms of crop yields than any other type of plant disease.

The use of disease resistant crop strains, in conjunction with fungicides, is currently able to control mildew disease but the powdery mildews are able to evolve such that they become insensitive to fungicides and are able to overcome crop resistance.

Sequencing the Blumeria genome will produce large quantities of information that will benefit biological research and support the development of new methods to control the disease in cereal crops. It will also allow the emergence of fungicide resistance and host plant resistance to be monitored.

The major aims of the consortium are:

1. Completely sequence the genome of Blumeria
2. Analyse the sequence computationally to annotate features of interest e.g. genes
3. Produce a final annotation approved by a group of experts in fungal biology
4. Provide all data produced to the scientific community through this website.

This work is supported by BBSRC grant BBE0009831.