The consortium of scientists from the Durham and Newcastle universities, and the UK government's Central Science Laboratory plan to identify these defence genes, enabling them to be used in wheat breeding programmes.

BBC: Broccoli (Image: BBC)

In 1952 news of Vogel's wheat filtered down to a remote research station in Mexico, where a man named Norman Borlaug was breeding fungus-resistant wheat for a project funded by the Rockefeller Foundation.

ECONOMIST: The story of wheat: Ears of plenty | The