Disease-resistant crops harvested from EU-funded study

A project funded by the European Union has produced crops that are capable of defending themselves against disease. The research team hope that, by reducing the scale and occurrence of plant disease, crop yields will be higher.

The research is particularly important given the amount of crops needed to sustain a constantly growing global population. The study, funded with around two million Euros under the EU’s Sixth Framework Programme, and supported by the European Research Area Network (ERA-NET) on plant genomics (ERA-PG).

The research team aimed to improve the capability of the plants’ own immune system in order to fight diseases. This is easier said than done: different plants have different capacities to combat different diseases. Scientists from The Sainsbury Laboratory in the UK, alongside an international team, worked on identifying an immune receptor known as the pattern recognition receptor (PRR) found in some plant species. PRRs identify molecules that are essential to keeping a pathogen alive so, if plant PRRs can be engineered to recognise and defend against these common molecules, they should be able to defend against all pathogens.

The researchers used a Brassica-specific PRR and transformed it into two plants (including one tomato plant) to find out if new recognition receptors lead to better resistance, before testing this resistance against many types of plant pathogens. Their results showed that resistance against many bacteria was significantly increased, and that PRRs could be successfully transferred between plant families.

'The strength of this resistance is because it has come from a different plant family, which the pathogen has not had any chance to adapt to, ' explained Dr Cyril Zipfel of The Sainsbury Laboratory. 'We can now transfer this resistance across plant species boundaries in a way traditional breeding cannot.' 


The team are hoping that their research can be applied to disease-susceptible crops such as potato, cassava, apple and banana.

(Source: CORDIS)

For more information on the project, visit the ERA-PG website.

Published: Tuesday, 16th March 2010 by Tom Freeman

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