Stop helping pathogens: engineering plant susceptibility genes for durable resistance

Hernan Garcia-Ruiz, Boris Szurek, Guido Van den Ackerveken

Research output: Contribution to journalReview articlepeer-review

Abstract

Alternatives to protect crops against diseases are desperately needed to secure world food production and make agriculture more sustainable. Genetic resistance to pathogens utilized so far is mostly based on single dominant resistance genes that mediate specific recognition of invaders and that is often rapidly broken by pathogen variants. Perturbation of plant susceptibility (S) genes offers an alternative providing plants with recessive resistance that is proposed to be more durable. S genes enable the establishment of plant disease, and their inactivation provides opportunities for resistance breeding of crops. However, loss of S gene function can have pleiotropic effects. Developments in genome editing technology promise to provide powerful methods to precisely interfere with crop S gene functions and reduce tradeoffs.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)187-195
Number of pages9
JournalCurrent Opinion in Biotechnology
Volume70
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Aug 2021

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
We thank Dmitry Lapin (Utrecht University, Netherlands) for critical feedback on the manuscript. Research in the HG-R lab is supported by N.I.H. grant R01GM120108 and by the Nebraska Agricultural Experiment Station with funding from the Hatch Act (Accession Number 1007272) through the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture . The research of GVdA is supported by grants of the Dutch Research Council (NWO) . The research of BS is supported by subawards to IRD from the Heinrich Heine University of Dusseldorf funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation .

Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 The Author(s)

Funding

We thank Dmitry Lapin (Utrecht University, Netherlands) for critical feedback on the manuscript. Research in the HG-R lab is supported by N.I.H. grant R01GM120108 and by the Nebraska Agricultural Experiment Station with funding from the Hatch Act (Accession Number 1007272) through the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture . The research of GVdA is supported by grants of the Dutch Research Council (NWO) . The research of BS is supported by subawards to IRD from the Heinrich Heine University of Dusseldorf funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation .

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