robabeh.hosseini@postgrad.curtin.edu.au, dion.bennett@agtbreeding.com.au, fatima.naim@curtin.edu.au,

m.gibberd@exchange.curtin.edu.au, a.zerihun@curtin.edu.au

Towards future food security, it is necessary to improve the durability of crop plants against devastating diseases that result in large yield losses. Plants have two defence mechanisms to cope with disease pressure: resistance and tolerance. Although much research is dedicated to characterising disease resistance and susceptibility genes, very little is known about cellular mechanisms that enable cereal crops to tolerate foliar diseases in the Australian context.

This study aims to generate foundation knowledge to assess Australian wheat cultivars' ability to tolerate foliar fungal diseases of concern. For this, a field trial was established in York, Western Australia, and a set of 24 wheat genotypes were exposed to natural infection with predominant fungal diseases.

We applied a combination of high-resolution micro and macro phenotyping and molecular characterisation techniques to associate macro phenotypes to the amount of pathogen present within the leaf. Understanding the phenotypic and genotypic mechanisms of tolerance will, in turn, enable breeders to select from a wider pool of traits to breed for more durable crop plants. I will present our preliminary results on the progress we have made with assessing tolerance.