Determination of vomitoxin or deoxynivalenol (DON) content of barley research samples

The collaborative project to improve Fusarium head blight (FHB) resistance in barley is led by James Tucker of Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada’s (AAFC) Brandon Research and Development Centre, and involves researchers at other locations within AAFC as well as the other public barley breeding programs in western Canada. FHB is the most economically damaging disease of barley in Canada, and the accumulation of mycotoxins such as DON produced by the fungus Fusarium graminearum reduce the acceptability of barley for malting and brewing purposes as well as for animal feed, particularly hogs. The use of genetic resistance to control this disease is the most desirable solution in the longer term. Thousands of barley breeding lines are screened each year in the large FHB nursery at Brandon and in several smaller subsidiary FHB nurseries at other locations across Canada. Visual symptoms in 2019 indicate that the DON content of the samples should be moderately high, likely in the mid to upper range (for an artificially inoculated FHB nurseries, which are typically much higher than seen in farmer’s fields). The visual symptoms of this disease are not well correlated to mycotoxin levels so DON testing is critical to success of the project, and is one of the main limiting factors. Under this project, Dr. Barbara Blackwell’s lab at AAFC’s Ottawa Research and Development Centre, Ottawa, conducts up to 6,000 DON analyses by the ELISA technique each year. It is not possible to expand on this number at the Ottawa Research and Development Centre (AAFC-ORDC) so we require the additional samples from the 2019 nurseries be done elsewhere.