SBC

The Stakman-Borlaug Center (SBC) for Sustainable Plant Health at the University of Minnesota builds upon the vision and contributions of the preeminent crop scientists E.C. Stakman and Norman Borlaug. Recognizing that the toughest problems in agriculture today require highly diverse approaches, the SBC leverages multidisciplinary expertise to address plant health issues that impact food security and ecosystem health through research and education. The focus of SBC activities is local, national, and international; the impact of the SBC is global. The SBC maintains and manages a diverse plant health research portfolio and leads multidisciplinary research initiatives, student training programs, and capacity building efforts. Current rust research-related activities include organizing and fostering the international oat rust community to investigate diseases such as crown rust and stem rust. By advocating for oat rust research funding at the institutional, national, and international levels and leveraging expertise in genomics, phenomics and informatics, the SBC aims to identify novel forms of rust resistance in wild oat relatives and non-hosts. The SBC also plays supporting and project management roles in other cereal rust research and capacity building efforts led by scientists at the University of Minnesota and USDA-ARS Cereal Disease Laboratory, including a project aimed at characterizing Pgt isolates with unique virulences from Ethiopia and a 6-week summer training program for rust researchers. The complete SBC research, education, and capacity building portfolio can be found at sbc.umn.edu.