Gail Canning

Gail is a member of the wheat pathogenomics team. She has experience of working on a range of fungal plant pathogens of wheat and oilseed rape, including Fusarium graminearum, Zymoseptoria tritici and Sclerotinia sclerotiorum. Since 2010, Gail's main area of research has been in fungal aerobiology and take-all research Gail's areas of expertise are in molecular biology, microbiology and plant phenotyping. As part of her aerobiology research, she is involved in the performance of qPCR and LAMP-based assays to detect for the presence of airborne fungal spores. This information is used by the farming community to identify optimal fungicide application as well as helping the development of disease forecasting models. Gail's work on the soil-borne take-all root fungus, Gaumannomyces tritici, is more field based. She is involved in the phenotyping and disease scoring of field trials, as well as take-all disease assessment of seedling and mature wheat plants. Gail is also responsible for the Gaumannomyces tritici isolate collection, held at Rothamsted Research, which dates back to 1966.