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

这项小企业创新研究（SBIR）项目的更广泛影响/商业潜力是开发抗病大豆品种，减少植物病害对农业生产造成的重大损失。全球因疾病造成的损失可高达40%，每年造成数十亿美元的损失。仅大豆一项，每年因植物病害造成的产值损失估计高达30亿美元。此外，植物病害对作物的破坏威胁到全球粮食安全，并由于使用杀虫剂对环境产生重大负面影响。在具有重要农业意义的作物中应用可调的广谱抗病策略将产生重大的社会影响，保护作物免受目前无法获得替代解决方案的毁灭性疾病的侵害，确保农业生产，并减少农用化学品对环境的污染。未来，他们的目标是将这项技术应用于其他重要的农业作物，如玉米、水稻和番茄。这个SBIR一期项目的智力优势是设计出可调的、广谱的抗病大豆品种。本项目将通过序列同源性构建大豆免疫调控盒，并在最小产量损失的情况下，通过病原菌诱导对多种疾病的抗性进行功能验证。本项目将使用的方法包括大豆序列的生物信息学分析，以鉴定同源防御基因和相应的调控元件，分子克隆，拟南芥和大豆植株的转化，以及对转化植株进行测试，以确定对不同类型病原体的抗性水平。该项目的结果对于在项目的第二阶段进行更大规模的现场试验至关重要。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值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.