When I started my career, the field was
called plant pathology, and we didn't understand anything about the plant immune system.
Eduard Akhunov, associate professor of
plant pathology at Kansas State University, and his colleague, Jorge Dubcovsky from the University of California - Davis, led a research project that identified a gene that gives wheat
plants resistance to one of the most deadly races of the wheat stem rust pathogen —
called Ug99 — that was first discovered in Uganda in 1999.