Nichola Hawkins

Cowslip plant with yellow flowers

A rosette of orchid leaves growing in the ground among grass

Signs of Spring around the @niab-uk.bsky.social Park Farm site despite the stormy weather today: the first Cowslips flowering, and Bee orchid rosettes starting to appear.

Shepherd's purse inflorescence covered in white rust

Seeing a lot of Albugo candida "white rust" (actually an oomycete, not a basidiomycete fungus like other rusts) on Shepherd's purse around here at the moment #WildPlantDisease

Niab's Charlotte Nellist, Kostya Kanyuka and Nichola Hawkins presenting at yesterday's AHDB UKCPVS stakeholder meeting. Charlotte and Kostya introduced updates from 2025, before Nichola discussed fungicide resistance status in cereals. For more on the UKCPVS see https://ow.ly/JMjN50XWabj

The new SDHIs are highly effective, but with that comes the potential to select for higher levels of resistance, so resistance management is especially important: always mixing with robust partners with different MoAs, and where possible alternating with different MoAs too.

In this week's @farmersweeklyuk.bsky.social podcast, @aoifeodriscoll.bsky.social talks about the latest results from our AHDB-funded fungicide resistance monitoring and what this means for growers. omny.fm/shows/the-fa...

🚨New #PhD #adverts alert🚨

I currently have two PhD studentships being advertised on environmental #AMR ⬇️

More being advertised soon 👀

@ukceh.bsky.social @ukceh-moleco.bsky.social

A fab bunch of talks for Session 1 Disease Management in Practice #PPATH2025
🌾 Helen Bates @niab-uk.bsky.social
🥔 Ashleigh Holmes @hutton.ac.uk
🧬 Aimee Fowkes - Fera x @newcastleuni.bsky.social
🍓 Avice Hall @herts.ac.uk

Sea couch #SeedHeads, some infected with ergot fungus. On the sand dunes at Bridgwater Bay. #WildFlowerHour

And on the fungal side, my first puffballs of the year.

And a rather deceptive plant: this is actually Lesser knapweed, but a rayed form, so it looks like Greater knapweed flowers on a Lesser knapweed plant!

A hybrid goat's-beard flower with purple outer rays and yellow centre

A cinquefoil plant with yellow flowers

A silver cinquefoil plant, showing the silver downy underside of the leaves

I always enjoy getting the chance to go out botanising in the field with the @wildflowersociety.bsky.social . This morning's plants included Silver cinquefoil Potentilla argentea, and the stunning hybrid goat's-beard Tragopogon x mirabilis.

And taking an empty screw-top 2ml tube to practice one-handed opening and closing.

We've seen lots of examples of parallel evolution at the point mutation level in fungicide target encoding genes (onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1...), and now @thorstenlangner.bsky.social has found repeated evolution of point mutations in a plant pathogen effector, too!

Resistance evolution means we absolutely need more tools in the crop protection toolbox, but it also means those new tools must be designed and deployed with resistance in mind. Considering resistance risk and management in advance is far better than only reacting after it emerges.

We also consider what we have learned (sometimes the hard way!) about resistance management and IPM over almost six decades of single-site fungicide use, and what this means for the deployment and management of new measures to maximise durability.

We consider how the molecular mechanisms of resistance against fungicides, and mechanisms of fungal genome evolution more generally, could apply to potential RNAi resistance, and what this means for RNAi target selection and construct design.

Contributors include @melonamaranth.bsky.social, @dannagifford.bsky.social, @florianhartig.bsky.social, @gmpreston.bsky.social, @mfseidl.bsky.social, @pietrospanu.bsky.social.

This paper was the result of a workshop co-organised by @timbarra.bsky.social, Joris Alkemade and I, bringing together experts in RNAi, fungicides, AMR and fungal evolution.

Fungicide resistance is a big reason why we need alternative crop protection measures, but we must consider the risk of those other crop protection measures also selecting for resistance, especially for target-specific methods like RNAi.

Learning from fungicide resistance: Evolutionary insights to guide RNAi-based control of fungal crop pathogens Crop protection against fungal pathogens is essential to prevent crop losses and maintain food security. Current crop protection relies heavily on che…

New paper out now in @britmycolsoc.org.uk Fungal Biology Reviews. Learning from fungicide resistance: Evolutionary insights to guide RNAi-based control of fungal crop pathogens. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

An ash tree branch with some seeds and some rough brown galls.

Ash flower galls, caused by a mite, Acerina fraxinivora. A heavy infestation like this will reduce seed production but won't kill the tree.

Viper's bugloss in the evening sunlight #WildFlowerHour #HairyPlants

A great day hearing from other plant-related research groups around Cambridge.

A Cyclone spore trap in a field

A wheat leaf with brown rust pustules

Wheat plants heavily infected with brown rust

St Quentin town hall and square

This week I've been in France for a project meeting of our JPI-AMR project, Aerobiomics-AMR. Between meetings, we saw one of the Cyclone spore traps in action, visited Arvalis field trials with very high levels of brown rust, and stayed in the lovely town of St. Quentin.

For the #WildFlowerHour #PinkFamily challenge, White campion with bonus #WildPlantDisease Anther smut.

screenshot of the home page of the Field Guide to Plant Pathogens

For the past few months I've been working on bringing to life something that I think is really needed: a field guide to plant pathogens (focusing on fungi and oomycetes). It has gotten to the point where I feel I can share it publically - read more at irishplants.org/blog/2025/03... ! #FungiFriends

Fungal antimicrobial resistance: online mini-symposium, March 27th. Cutting-edge genomics & fungal AMR breakthroughs with world-leading experts (and me!)

I am very excited that @target-amr.bsky.social and the Fungal AMR One Health network (www.fungalamr.org) are organising an online mini-symposium on Fungal AMR Genomics on 25 March 1-4 pm GMT.

Please sign up here! www.targetamr.org.uk/hdrevents/jo...

A yellow flower of lesser celandine.

First celandine of the year! #WildFlowerHour

#TheWinter10 part 3 (chickweed is behind the Shepherd's purse)