January 31, 2013

ISB News Report - February 2013
by Jean-Benoit Morel

Plants are constantly facing pathogen attacks, and disease resistance is one of the major traits targeted by breeders. The most commonly used genetic solution is the so-called major Resistance (R) genes that confer high levels of resistance. However, these R genes suffer from two important drawbacks: They only act on a subset of the pathogen’s population, and they are often broken down by the pathogen’s capacities to by-pass this type of re-sistance. Therefore other forms of resistance, like quantitative resistance, are also wanted. While exploring the diversity of the disease resistance pathway in rice, we found that monitoring constitutive expression of the arsenal is a powerful way to identify new genes regulating disease resistance, both positively and negatively, as well as a potential way to select for quantitative resistance without the need of pathogen inoculation. Here we propose an operational version of this finding.

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Website: http://www.isb.vt.edu

Published: January 31, 2013