Are we there yet for rice disease control

Authors: Jia, Yulin

Submitted to: Rice Technical Working Group Meeting Proceedings
Publication Type: Proceedings
Publication Acceptance Date: 1/19/2018
Publication Date: 10/16/2018
Citation: Jia, Y. 2018. Are we there yet for rice disease control. Proceedings of 37th Rice Technical Working Group Meeting, February 19-22, 2018, Long Beach, California. p 91. Electronic Publication.

Interpretive Summary:

Technical Abstract: Plant resistance (R) genes play an important role in fighting against plant pathogens. For the past two decades, significant efforts have been directed to map and clone R genes. Most of the cloned plant R genes encode proteins with leucine rich repeat and nucleotide binding sites (NLR), their cellular action and structure/function relationship have been largely unraveled. It has now become clear that plant immunity is involved in at least two tiers of defense responses. The first tier is involved in detecting pathogen molecules by surface receptors referred to as PAMP triggered immunity and the second tier, referred to as elicitor triggered immunity (ETI), is involved in recognition of elicitors by NLR proteins that either directly or indirectly trigger robust defense responses. Current knowledge on molecular mechanisms of host-pathogen interactions will be reviewed. Specifically, 1) the reliability of the reference genome, 2) how pathogen has evolved, 3) how pathogen effector genes are selected, 4) what we can learn from DNA sequences of effectors, 5) what is the real power of the effectors, 6) how plant NLR genes and their cognate partners work together in triggering effective disease resistance responses. Pros and cons of the development of new resistance cultivars via a marker assisted selection and genetic engineering will be discussed.