Studies in Indian cereal smuts

Summary

Smuts cause heavy losses to grain crops in India but before effective methods of controlling them can be devised their mode of transmission should be clearly understood. Where a smut is definitely known to be seed transmissible, methods of treating the seed have been devised but many of these methods involve a certain amount of cost and also danger. The development of disease resistant varieties helps in such cases to solve the problem.

Investigations have been started in the Imperial Agricultural Research Institute at Delhi to test the relative resistance of strains of wheat, oats and barley to their respective smuts and encouraging results have been obtained which will be published in a series of papers, of which this forms the introduction.