farming because of lower demands for pesticide applications. Triticale as a hybrid of wheat and rye may possess disease resistances derived either or both from wheat and rye. In the Czech Republic the leaf rust pathogen isolated from triticale is Puccinia triticina. Triticale is usually resistant to the rye leaf rust pathogen (P. recondita). Limited information is available comparing P. triticina isolates collected from wheat and triticale. Manninger (2006, Acta Phytopathologica and Entomologica Hungarica 41: 93-100) pathotyped 82 isolates collected from wheat and triticale on 15 Thatcher NILs. More than 50% of isolates from wheat were virulent to Lr2b, Lr2c, Lr3, Lr11, Lr17, Lr21 and Lr26. Of 12 isolates from triticale 9 were virulent only to Lr2b and Lr2c and the other 3 isolates were virulent to Lr2b, Lr2c and Lr11. We inoculated 15 NILs and 7 triticale cultivars with 36 Pt isolates from wheat and 36 isolates from triticale. Characteristic differences between the reactions on NILs of isolates from triticale and wheat were not found except that virulence to Lr1 was much more frequent in isolates from wheat. Whereas isolates from triticale were virulent to all 7 tested triticale cultivars, isolates from wheat were virulent to only 3 triticales. In another experiment isolates from wheat and triticale were collected at four locations. Although paired isolates came from the same locations the responses of the NILs were different. Isolates from triticale for all four locations were virulent to a higher number of triticale cultivars than those from wheat. It seems that P. triticina races infecting triticale have changed over the last decade from having a narrow virulence range on bread wheat to the current situation of typical bread wheat races becoming specialized on triticale.
