Engineering Plants for Resistance Against Pathogens

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The University of California, Davis, will establish a Science and Technology Center for Engineering Plants for Resistance Against Pathogens. The Director of the Center will be Professor George E. Bruening. The goal of the center is to develop an integrated molecular and biochemical understanding of plant responses to diverse pathogens. The tomato will be developed as a model organism for these studies. Participants will include faculty from the University of California, Davis and Berkeley campuses, Cornell University, Washington University, and scientists from Calgene, Inc. The Center has three major research objectives: 1. Genes and molecules that mediate recognition of pathogens by plants will be characterized. The types of molecules involved in the early determinative phases of plant-parasite interactions will be identified and used to demonstrate the recognition capabilities of the plants' defense mechanisms. 2. Molecular characterization of susceptible and resistant host responses will be accomplished by identifying the genes and molecules that are differentially regulated during susceptible and resistant responses. Signal-transduction pathways and regulatory mechanisms will be dissected genetically and biochemically. Genes that potentially mediate susceptible or resistant responses will be functionally analyzed in transgenic plants. 3. Novel strategies for interfering with pathogen increase, movement, or transmission will be developed. The initial focus will be on the mechanisms of viral replication and transmission. The efficacy of satellite and defective interfering RNAs, transgenic plants expressing viral coat protein, and transgenic plants expressing defective transmission proteins will be investigated. The molecular basis of host-pathogen interactions is one of the major unknowns in plant biology. Successful completion of the basic aspects of this work should lead to the development of novel means to control plant disease in a variety of crops. This would in turn reduce the amount of chemical fungicides and pesticides required for crop protection, thereby reducing both production costs and environmental contamination. The center will stimulate enhanced interdisciplinary training in the plant sciences and the development of human resources.