Open science to tackle a cereal killer on the run

Now published in PLOS Biology, 17:e3000302.

Outbreaks of emerging plant diseases and insect pests are increasing at an alarming rate threatening the food security needs of a booming world population. The role of plant pathologists in addressing these threats to plant health is critical. This report elaborates our personal experience with the appearance in Bangladesh of a destructive new fungal disease wheat blast. Here we recap our experience and stress the importance of open science platforms and crowdsourced community responses in tackling emerging plant diseases. Benefits of the open science approach include recruitment of multidisciplinary experts, application of cutting-edge methods and timely replication of data analyses to increase the robustness of the findings.