SBIR Phase I: Engineering broad-spectrum disease resistance in soybean without fitness cost

这一小型企业创新研究(SBIR)项目的更广泛影响/商业潜力是开发抗病大豆品种，这些品种将减少植物病害造成的农业生产的重大损失。全球疾病造成的损失可能高达40%，每年造成数十亿美元的损失。仅在大豆领域，每年就有约30亿美元的产值因植物病害而损失。此外，植物病害对农作物的破坏威胁着全球粮食安全，并因使用杀虫剂而对环境产生重大负面影响。在农业上重要的作物中应用可调整的广谱抗病战略将产生重大的社会影响，因为它可以保护作物免受目前无法找到替代解决方案的毁灭性疾病的侵袭，确保农业生产，并减少农业化学品对环境的污染。在未来，目标是将建议的技术应用于其他重要的农业作物，如玉米、水稻和番茄。这项SBIR第一阶段项目的智力优势是设计出可调的、广谱抗病的大豆品种。在本项目中，将通过序列同源性构建大豆免疫调节盒，然后通过展示病原菌诱导的对各种病害的抗性来验证其功能，并以最小的产量损失进行验证。该项目将使用的方法包括对大豆序列进行生物信息学分析，以确定同源防御基因和相应的调控元件，分子克隆，转化拟南芥和大豆植株，以及测试得到的转化植株以确定对不同类型病原菌的抗性水平。该项目的结果将是推进更大规模的现场试验的关键，该试验将在该项目的第二阶段完成。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) project is to develop disease resistant soybean varieties that will reduce the substantial losses in agricultural production caused by plant diseases. Loss to disease can be as high as 40% globally and cost billions of dollars annually. In soybean alone, an estimated $3 billion dollars of production value is lost from plant diseases annually. In addition, the destruction of crops by plant diseases threatens global food security and has a significant negative impact on the environment due to the use of pesticides. Application of a tunable, broad-spectrum disease resistance strategy in agriculturally important crops will have a major societal impact by protecting crops from devastating diseases for which alternative solutions are not currently available, securing agricultural production, and reducing environmental pollution from agricultural chemicals. In the future, the goal is to apply the proposed technology to other agriculturally important crops such as corn, rice, and tomato.The intellectual merit of this SBIR Phase I project is to engineer tunable, broad-spectrum disease resistant soybean varieties. In this project, a soybean immune regulatory cassette will be constructed through sequence homology, and then functionally validated by demonstrating pathogen-inducible resistance against various diseases with minimal yield penalty. The methods that will be used in this project include bioinformatic analysis of soybean sequences to identify homologous defense genes and corresponding regulatory elements, molecular cloning, transformation of both Arabidopsis and Soybean plants, and testing the resulting transformant plants to determine levels of resistance to different types of pathogens. Results from this project will be essential for moving forward with larger field trials, which to be accomplished in the Phase II of the project.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.