Engineering tolerance to Botrytis in soft fruit crops

灰霉病是软果类作物常见的坏死性真菌病原，每年造成巨大的经济损失。病原菌喜欢感染受损或衰老的组织，如花和水果，最终导致组织死亡。栽培草莓(Fragaria X Ananassa)材料似乎普遍感病，尽管灰霉病的发病率和严重程度已有报道。据报道，野生亲本Fragaria Chiloensis和Fragaria virginiana也出现了抗性/耐性。几种已知的真菌抑制剂在抗病材料中被高度诱导，但其抗药性机制尚不清楚。在树莓中，对甘蔗灰霉病的抗性则知之甚少，尽管对甘蔗灰霉病的抗性与控制甘蔗柔毛的H基因有关。NIAB EMR收集了一系列野生草莓材料，可以筛选出对灰霉病的抗性/耐受性。它还拥有丰富的栽培草莓和几个野生材料的基因组数据，这些数据可以被挖掘出来，以确定是否存在对灰霉病耐受的已知成分。目前，公开可用的树莓基因组资源很少，这阻碍了对包括抗病在内的一系列性状的研究。本项目将围绕以下问题展开：1)蔷薇科植物-灰霉病互作的遗传成分是什么？2)从野生物种中导入哪些有效成分可以有效地保护栽培草莓和树莓对灰霉病的侵染？项目目标：1.在对照实验中筛选不同的草莓和树莓材料，包括野生近缘植物对灰霉病的抗性/抗性。研究了栽培草莓-B的遗传途径。灰树和覆盆子-B。通过对灰霉病菌侵染过程的分子分析。利用已知的野生草莓致病相关蛋白转化栽培草莓和树莓(使用CRISPR)，并确定对灰霉病的影响。该项目的结果将使人们更好地了解这种重要的经济疾病，但也将导致育种材料的改进，减少这种毁灭性疾病的损失，以及建立草莓和树莓的资源。

Botrytis cinerea, Grey Mould disease, is a common necrotrophic fungal pathogen of soft fruit crops and causes huge economic losses each year. The pathogen prefers to infect damaged or senescing tissues, such as flowers and fruit, eventually leading to tissue death. Cultivated strawberry (Fragaria x ananassa) accessions appear to be universally susceptible, although variation of incidence and severity of grey mould has been reported. Resistance/tolerance has been reported in the wild progenitors Fragaria chiloensis and Fragaria virginiana. Several known fungal inhibitors are highly induced in resistant F. chiloensis accessions, but the mechanism of resistance is not understood. In raspberry, much less is known, although resistance to cane botrytis has been associated with Gene H, which controls cane pubescence. NIAB EMR has a collection of wild strawberry material that can be screened for resistance/tolerance to grey mould. It also has wealth of genomic data on the cultivated strawberry and several wild accessions, which can be mined for presence of known components of tolerance to B. cinerea. At present, there are very few genomic resources publicly available for raspberry; this is hampering research on a range of traits including disease resistance. The project will focus around the following questions: 1) What are the genetic components of Rosaceae-Botrytis interactions? 2) What can usefully be brought from wild species into cultivated strawberry and raspberry to protect against B. cinerea?Project objectives:1. Screen diverse strawberry and raspberry material, including wild relatives for tolerance/resistance to Botrytis fruit rot in controlled experiments.2. Characterise the genetic pathways of the cultivated strawberry-B. cinerea and raspberry-B. cinerea through molecular analyses of the infection process.3. Transform cultivated strawberry and raspberry (using CRISPR) with known pathogenesis-related proteins from wild strawberry and determine effects on Botrytis colonisation.Outputs from this project will lead to a greater understanding of this economically important disease but will lead to improvements in breeding material, reducing losses from this devastating disease, as well as building up resources for strawberry and raspberry.