Quantifying airborne dispersal routes of pathogens over continents to safeguard global wheat supply.

Infectious crop diseases spreading over large agricultural areas pose a threat to food security. Aggressive strains of the obligate pathogenic fungus Puccinia graminis f.sp. tritici (Pgt), causing the crop disease wheat stem rust, have been detected in East Africa and the Middle East, where they lead to substantial economic losses and threaten livelihoods of farmers. The majority of commercially grown wheat cultivars worldwide are susceptible to these emerging strains, which pose a risk to global wheat production, because the fungal spores transmitting the disease can be wind-dispersed over regions and even continents 1-11 . Targeted surveillance and control requires knowledge about airborne dispersal of pathogens, but the complex nature of long-distance dispersal poses significant challenges for quantitative research 12-14 . We combine international field surveys, global meteorological data, a Lagrangian dispersion model and high-performance computational resources to simulate a set of disease outbreak scenarios, tracing billions of stochastic trajectories of fungal spores over dynamically changing host and environmental landscapes for more than a decade. This provides the first quantitative assessment of spore transmission frequencies and amounts amongst all wheat producing countries in Southern/East Africa, the Middle East and Central/South Asia. We identify zones of high air-borne connectivity that geographically correspond with previously postulated wheat rust epidemiological zones (characterized by endemic disease and free movement of inoculum) 10,15 , and regions with genetic similarities in related pathogen populations 16,17 . We quantify the circumstances (routes, timing, outbreak sizes) under which virulent pathogen strains such as 'Ug99' 5,6 pose a threat from long-distance dispersal out of East Africa to the large wheat producing areas in Pakistan and India. Long-term mean spore dispersal trends (predominant direction, frequencies, amounts) are summarized for all countries in the domain (Supplementary Data). Our mechanistic modelling framework can be applied to other geographic areas, adapted for other pathogens and used to provide risk assessments in real-time 3 .

Streptomyces coelicolor Dps-like proteins: differential dual roles in response to stress during vegetative growth and in nucleoid condensation during reproductive cell division.

The Dps protein, a member of the ferritin family, contributes to DNA protection during oxidative stress and plays a central role in nucleoid condensation during stationary phase in unicellular eubacteria. Genome searches revealed the presence of three Dps-like orthologues within the genome of the Gram-positive bacterium Streptomyces coelicolor. Disruption of the S. coelicolor dpsA, dpsB and dpsC genes resulted in irregular condensation of spore nucleoids in a gene-specific manner. These irregularities are correlated with changes to the spacing between sporulation septa. This is the first example of these proteins playing a role in bacterial cell division. Translational fusions provided evidence for both developmental control of DpsA and DpsC expression and their localization to sporogenic compartments of aerial hyphae. In addition, various stress conditions induced expression of the Dps proteins in a stimulus-dependent manner in vegetative hyphae, suggesting stress-induced, protein-specific protective functions in addition to their role during reproductive cell division. Unlike in other bacteria, the S. coelicolor Dps proteins are not induced in response to oxidative stress.