Crop vaccination without side effects: optimising the cost-benefit balance of chemically induced immune priming in greenhouse vegetables.

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It is possible that over half of the crops cultivated each year are lost to pests and diseases. The use of chemical pesticides helps to reduce these losses, but many pesticides are becoming less efficient as diseases develop resistance, and others are being removed from the market because of fears that they might affect the environment or human health. The objective of our project is to develop a different approach to protecting crops by boosting their own immune system. This strategy, known as chemically induced immune priming, has been used to protect some crops against commercially important diseases, including grey mould and downy mildew. However, the commercialisation of these resistance-inducing chemicals has not been successful, because they often also repress plant growth. A recent breakthrough by our research team showed that it is possible to separate the resistance-inducing effects of the chemical priming agent beta-aminobutyric acid (BABA) from its growth repressing effects. Although BABA protects plants against an exceptionally wide range of commercially relevant diseases, it also stunts plant growth and affects crop yield when applied at higher doses. Recently, we discovered that the receptor for BABA controls disease resistance and the accompanying plant stress response via separate signalling pathways (Luna et al. 2014; Nature Chemical Biology 10: 450 - 456). The current project aims to translate these research findings from the model system (Arabidopsis) to vegetable crops (tomato and lettuce). The international plant breeding company Enza Zaden, one of the world's largest suppliers of vegetable seeds to farmers, are so excited about the opportunity to enhance the benefits of immune priming that they have offered to make their research materials available to us and to co-fund our work. Together, we have designed an entirely novel project to optimize chemically-induced immune priming in vegetable crops, using an integrated approach of genetic and chemical strategies to reduce input of pesticides in the vegetable industry. If successful, our approach can be used effectively to protect vegetable crops in a more sustainable manner from damaging diseases.