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

15 Scopus citations

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 (US)
Pages (from-to)187-195
Number of pages9
JournalCurrent Opinion in Biotechnology
Volume70
DOIs
StatePublished - Aug 2021

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Biotechnology
  • Bioengineering
  • Biomedical Engineering

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