LONDON (March 15 2010): An international
team of scientists has managed to transfer
disease resistance from one plant family to
another, offering broader protection from
potentially costly and destructive pests.
A team led by Cyril Zipfel at Britain's
Sainsbury Laboratory found that transferring
a single gene from a wild plant to
disease-susceptible crop plants made them
more robust against infections like
bacterial wilt and other diseases.
If the results can be duplicated more
widely, they could help prevent massive crop
losses and avoid environmental, health and
financial costs associated with using
pesticides, the researchers wrote in the
Nature Biotechnology journal on Sunday. "The
implications for engineering crop plants
with enhanced resistance to infectious
diseases are very promising," Sophien Kamoun,
head of the Sainsbury Laboratory, said in a
commentary.
The team is already extending its work to
several crop plants, including potato,
apple, cassava and banana - all of which
suffer from damaging bacterial diseases,
particularly in the developing world.
The Consultative Group on International
Agricultural Research (CGIAR) said last year
that bacterial wilt disease had been found
in bananas in Ethiopia, Uganda, Rwanda,
Kenya, Tanzania and the Democratic Republic
of Congo.
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