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

这一小企业创新研究（SBIR）项目的更广泛影响/商业潜力是开发抗病大豆品种，以减少植物病害对农业生产造成的重大损失。 疾病造成的损失在全球范围内可高达40%，每年造成数十亿美元的损失。仅在大豆方面，每年因植物病害造成的产值损失估计为30亿美元。 此外，植物病害对作物的破坏威胁着全球粮食安全，并因使用农药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，保护作物免受目前没有替代解决方案的毁灭性疾病的影响，确保农业生产，减少农业化学品对环境的污染。 未来，目标是将所提出的技术应用于其他重要的农业作物，如玉米、水稻和番茄。SBIR第一阶段项目的智力价值是设计可调的、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，然后通过以最小的产量损失证明病原体诱导的对各种疾病的抗性来功能验证。该项目将使用的方法包括大豆序列的生物信息学分析，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物，并测试所得的拟南芥植物，以确定对不同类型病原体的抗性水平。该项目的结果对于推进更大规模的现场试验至关重要，该试验将在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.