Online WG meeting 2022
organized by colleagues from Rennes, France
Covid impact
At our working Group meeting in Croatia (September, 2018) it was decided to hold our next meeting in Rennes, France during September 2020. We looked forward to this promise of a friendly meeting in this beautiful city, with delicious French cuisine throughout (and the conference dinner to be held at a nearby beach restaurant), and with everything well organized by colleagues at Université de Rennes 1. Unfortunately, only the last part of our dreams came true. Covid-19 came along and with most of the world in lockdown, holding an in-person meeting was clearly going to be impossible. A strength of our Working Group is the informality of the meetings, with ample opportunity for discussions and interactions, so we decided not to hold the meeting online, believing that the pandemic would not last too long and we rescheduled for September 2021. When that too, became impractical due to further waves of the pandemic and continuing travel disruption we again held off from an online meeting and rescheduled for May 2022; there was light at the end of the tunnel with vaccine roll-outs and this seemed realistic… But when the time came to finalize arrangements for the meeting the situation was still uncertain: although travel was possible, it was highly disrupted. So, we erred on the side of safety and caution: relenting finally to an online meeting.
Online meeting
The meeting was extremely well organized by our French colleagues from the Institute for Genetics, Environment and Plant Protection, Université de Rennes 1: Régine Delourme, Anne-Marie Cortesero, Nathalie Quéré and Maxime Hervé. Merci beaucoup to you all for organizing the registration process, handling offers of presentations and producing the abstract book and online links. An online meeting meant that more people than normal could attend, so there was also a slight benefit all in all. We had 138 registered participants from 27 different countries (*); our highest attendance ever! We were able to run a longer programme with 40 talks and 18 posters; with most of the posters presented via 5-minute ‘flash talks’. Additionally, the International Clubroot Initiative, coordinated by Elke Diederichsen from Freie Universität in Berlin-Dahlem decided to join us, giving one more full day to the pathologists’ programme, enriching it with an additional 14 full talks, which would have be hard to squeeze into the regular ICOC WG meeting. Despite the online format we were still able to hold engaging question & answer sessions with discussion and our usual informal atmosphere was still there! We just lacked the pleasure of each other’s company; it was a real disappointment for everyone not to be together in Rennes.
Contributions
This meeting was held not just in a pandemic, but also with war raging in Ukraine with the latter posing serious threats to global food security. We started the meeting with a hard-hitting presentation on agriculture in Ukraine with a focus on grains and oilseeds. Ukraine is the top global exporter of sunflower oil and contributes ca. 10 % of global exports in rapeseed and cereals. Without its contributions millions of people, mainly in African regions, are likely to be pushed into food poverty. Ukraine – our group stands with you!
This was followed by a presentation regarding French oilseeds production. It is clear that cropping oilseed rape in France (and Europe) is becoming increasingly challenging for farmers, with insect pests, in particular cabbage stem flea beetle (Psylliodes chrysocephala), posing a particular threat. These challenges are being met by our Entomology subgroup, with increased focus on this pest, with over half (20/36) of presentations regarding or including study of P. chrysocephala. Our opening session on insecticides made clear that pyrethroid resistance is rife across Europe in most pests of oilseed rape, but there are some new solutions on the horizon e. g. biopesticides and RNAi technologies. Breeding for resistance to insect pests is gaining in importance, with possibilities coming from understanding host plant selection processes. Understanding pest and natural enemy behaviour is helping to develop decision-making tools and improve crop and farmed landscape management practices including intercropping, flower strips and spatio-temporal distancing of oilseed rape cropping. This is facilitated by new the application of new sensor technologies such as camera trapping and AI/automatic detection algorithms.
Due to the fact that clubroot talks were mostly moved to the International Clubroot Workshop, the main focus of pathology talks concerned stem canker of brassicas, with one whole day, containing 9/17 presentations on this topic. The talks were started with the update on the pathogen populations in several countries, and followed by sources of resistance, differences between the species attacking oilseed rape and the mycobiota associated with the pathogen. The session on blackleg was ended by the moderated, overall discussion which included proposed changes to the taxonomic classification, changing the name of the causal fungal species from Leptosphaeria to Plenodomus. Numerous resistance genes commonly used by breeders derive their abbreviations from L. maculans and there are hundreds of papers, including many published by the members of our group using this nomenclature, so we generally disagree with the novel terminology. It creates the situation that most, if not all pathologists are still using the previous name of the pathogens, to be consistent with the literature. Pathology talks also concerned stem rot, verticilliose and light leaf spot as well as clubroot. The plant protection methods were summarised in one of the talks; they mostly rely on pyramiding of resistance genes, agrotechnical methods and fungicides. Some pesticides used against insects show a double effect and decrease disease incidence, in particular fungal diseases connected with the activity of stem boring insects, but also viruses transmitted by insect vectors.
Poster Awards
The best ‘flash talk posters’ were judged by the organizing committee.
Proud winners were:
- Evren Bingol: Leptosphaeria biglobosa inhibits production of secondary metabolite sirodesmin PL by L. maculans in planta
- Triin Kallavus: Assessing the effect of six essential oils on cabbage seedpod weevil and the parasitoid Nasonia vitipennis
- Sathya Thirumurugan: Relative susceptibility of canola and non-canola cultivars to Lipaphis erysimi aphids
The best traditional poster was:
- Beata Borowiak-Sobkowiak: Developmental and enzymatic defense response of hemp aphid Phorodon cannabis to the selected abiotic stresses
Congratulations to all winners of the Best Poster Award!
Next meeting
The next entomological and phytopathological problems of oilseed crops will be discussed in Dresden, Germany in 2024. We started to look forward to this during the ‘Zoom drink’ which ended the 18th meeting. Here we chatted about issues connected with changes in research groups, announced new PhD and post-doc positions, discussed novel research tools, sought help in gathering samples and enjoyed catching up a little. The group is well established with the core personnel attending as well as new participants, which makes us feel like one big biodiverse family!
If you want to find more news on our WG please go to the IOBC website:
https://iobc-wprs.org/expert-group/integrated-control-in-oilseed-crops-icoc/ (webmaster Madeleine Buehler), or the website of our group: http://wwwuser.gwdg.de/~iobc/index.php (webmaster Birger Koopmann).
*Participants from: Belgium, Canada, China, Columbia, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Ethiopia, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, India, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Poland, Serbia, South Korea, Sweden, Switzerland, The Netherlands, Tunisia, United Kingdom, Uruguay
.