In the wake of heightened wheat concern in the Nebraska Panhandle in 2023, this year brings positive news: The University of Nebraska–Lincoln is releasing a new wheat variety, NE Prism CLP, that stands out for its resistance to fungal disease, including fusarium head blight.

Last spring, Husker faculty members Katherine Frels and Stephen Wegulo began receiving concerned phone calls from Nebraska wheat growers. Something strange, the callers said, was going on in wheat fields in parts of the Panhandle.

The farmers were seeing field conditions they hadn’t encountered before: Their winter wheat had reached maturity, but the kernels had none of their familiar golden color and robust appearance. Instead, they were bleached and sickly.

Tombstones, such kernels are called — blighted irreparably by fungal assault.

The culprit was fusarium head blight, a notoriously destructive plant disease rarely seen in western Nebraska. The disease, also known as scab, undercuts yield and contaminates the grain with mycotoxins harmful to humans and animals.

“Producers were caught off-guard,” said Frels, Nebraska’s small grains breeder and an assistant professor of agronomy and horticulture.

The Panhandle region, which produces more than half of the state’s wheat, is normally free of the disease because that part of the state rarely receives enough rain to trigger the release of harmful fungal spores during wheat flowering.

But 2023 was not a normal year.

While drought kept a tight grip on much of eastern Nebraska last year, the Panhandle received above-average rainfall before and during wheat flowering, and the moisture enabled a rare outbreak of fusarium head blight. Wheat-producing areas in Kansas and Colorado were similarly affected.

“If there is a lot of rain two to three weeks before flowering and that rain is consistent into the flowering period for wheat, we know that the risk for fusarium head blight is pretty high,” said Wegulo, professor of plant pathology.

Wegulo, who is also a plant pathologist for Nebraska Extension, does extensive surveys of Nebraska wheat field conditions each spring and provides regular updates in CropWatch.

The new wheat variety, a two-gene Clearfield package, is available through NU Horizons Genetics and will be a key topic for Husker representatives when they meet with producers during the annual wheat field days in June.

Nebraska producers had requested a new Clearfield variety, and the university responded after extensive field testing, Frels said. The variety “has some other good things in the disease package, like some stripe rust resistance and stem rust resistance,” she said. “That’s what our growers expect from us.”

Fusarium head blight is best addressed though a two-pronged approach, using a crop variety with genetic resistance supplemented by appropriately timed fungicide application.

“For growers, you really can’t see it until it’s too late to do anything,” Frels said. “That’s why we want to have at least that moderate resistance out, and then ideally if the environment is right, we recommend that growers also spray fungicides to have the best chance of highly reducing the risk.”

Producers can benefit by regularly monitoring conditions through a widely used online fusarium risk tool, Frels and Wegulo said.

Wegulo and research technologist Julie Stevens carry out extensive testing on potential new wheat lines in the university’s breeding program, checking for resistance to three diseases (stem rust, leaf rust and fusarium head blight). Partner labs elsewhere in the country check for additional diseases before any new variety can move forward for consideration.

“We give that data to Katherine, and she will use that data to select her lines, looking at the level of disease resistance and other agronomic qualities,” Wegulo said. “We try to identify wheat varieties with resistance and then combine the resistance with fungicide application and determine the amount of disease control you get.”

The university’s efforts benefit greatly from the federal funding provided by the U.S. Wheat and Barley Scab Initiative, which promotes research to develop innovative approaches to address fusarium head blight. Some farm-state lawmakers, pointing to the value of the research, have called for the program’s funding to be increased as part of the next farm bill.

Wegulo is giving a presentation at an international conference in Athens, Greece, this summer on how climate change influences fusarium head blight.

“With climate change, we’re seeing this shift toward more intense precipitation in places where we traditionally have not seen it,” he said.

That was the case in Nebraska in 2023, as the rainfall amount in the Panhandle exceeded the norm.

“We cannot rule out that we are probably going to see fusarium head blight in the west more frequently than in the past,” Wegulo said.

LINCOLN, Neb. (KLKN) — A woman was killed Saturday night in a crash on Nebraska Highway 2 near Syracuse.

It happened just before 11 p.m. at the intersection with 34th Road, according to the Nebraska State Patrol.

A pickup truck was going south on 34th and was hit by an eastbound SUV, the patrol said.

Both vehicles went into the ditch, according to authorities.

A passenger in the SUV — 87-year-old Anna White of St. Joseph, Missouri — was pronounced dead at the scene.

A minor in the SUV was taken to a hospital in Omaha with injuries that were serious but not life-threatening.

Neither driver was injured in the crash, the patrol said.

The investigation is ongoing.

A research article published June 10 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences highlights the importance of careful application of high-tech forensic science to avoid wrongful convictions.

In a study with implications for an array of forensic examinations that rely on “vast databases and efficient algorithms,” researchers found the odds of a false match significantly increase when examiners make millions of comparisons in a quest to match wires found at a crime scene with the tools allegedly used to cut them.

The rate of mistaken identifications could be as high as one in 10 or more, concluded the researchers, who are affiliated with the Center for Statistics and Applications in Forensic Evidence, based in Ames, Iowa.

“It is somewhat of a counterintuition,” said co-author Susan VanderPlas, an assistant professor of statistics at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. “You are more likely to find the right match — but you’re also more likely to find the wrong match.”

VanderPlas worked as a research professor at CSAFE before moving to Nebraska in 2020. Co-authors of the study, “Hidden Multiple Comparisons Increase Forensic Error Rates,” were Heike Hoffmann and Alicia Carriquiry, both affiliated with CSAFE and Iowa State University’s Department of Statistics.

Wire cuts and tool marks are frequently used as evidence in robberies, bombings and other crimes. In the case of wire cuts, tiny striations on the cut ends of a wire may be matched to one of many available tools in a toolbox or garage. Comparing the evidence to more tools increases the chances that similar striations may be found on unrelated tools, resulting in a false accusation and conviction.

Wire-cutting evidence has been at issue in at least two cases that garnered national attention, including one where the accused was linked to a bombing based on a small piece of wire, a tiny fraction of an inch in diameter, that was matched to a tool found among the suspect’s belongings.

“Wire-cutting evidence is used in court and, based on our findings, it shouldn’t be — at least not without presenting additional information about how many comparisons were made,” VanderPlas said.

Wire cutting evidence is evaluated by comparing the striations found on the cut end of a piece of wire against the cutting blades of tools suspected to have been used in the crime. In a manual test, the examiner slides the end of the wire along the path created along another piece of material cut by the same tool to see where the pattern of striations match.

An automated process uses a comparison microscope and pattern-matching algorithms, to find possible matches pixel by pixel.

This can result in thousands upon thousands of individual comparisons, depending upon the length of the cutting blade, diameter of the wire and even the number of tools checked.

For example, VanderPlas said she and her husband tallied the various tin snips, wire cutters, pliers and similar tools stored in their garage and came up with a total of 7 meters in blade length.

Examiners may not even be aware of the number of comparisons they are making as they search for a matching pattern, because those comparisons are hidden in the algorithms.

“This often-ignored issue increases the false discovery rate, and can contribute to the erosion of public trust in the justice system through conviction of innocent individuals,” the study authors wrote.

Forensic examiners typically testify based upon subjective rules about how much similarity is required to make an identification, the study explained. The researchers could not obtain error rate studies for wire-cut examinations and used published error rates for ballistics examinations to estimate possible false discovery rates for wire-cut examinations.

Before wire-cut examinations are used as evidence in court, the researchers recommended that:

• Examiners report the overall length or area of materials used in the examination process, including blade length and wire diameter. This would enable examination-wide error rates to be calculated.

• Studies be conducted to assess both false discovery and false elimination error rates when examiners are making difficult comparisons. Studies should link the length and area of comparison to error rates.

• The number of items searched, comparisons made and results returned should be reported when a database is used at any stage of the forensic evidence evaluation process.

The VanderPlas article joins other reports calling for improvements in forensic science in America. The National Academies Press, publisher of the PNAS journal and other publications of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, also published the landmark 2009 report “Strengthening Forensic Science in the United States: A Path Forward.”