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ARS Home » Southeast Area » Raleigh, North Carolina » Plant Science Research » Research » Publications at this Location » Publication #422556
Research Project: Genetic Diversity and Disease Resistance in Maize

Location: Plant Science Research

Title: It’s complicated: Why are there so few commercially successful crop varieties engineered for disease resistance?

Author
item LIU, QINGLI - Syngenta Crop Protection
item Balint Kurti, Peter

Submitted to: Molecular Plant Pathology
Publication Type: Peer Reviewed Journal
Publication Acceptance Date: 3/6/2025
Publication Date: 3/9/2025
Citation: Liu, Q., Balint Kurti, P.J. 2025. It’s complicated: Why are there so few commercially successful crop varieties engineered for disease resistance?. Molecular Plant Pathology. https://doi.org/10.1111/mpp.70077.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/mpp.70077

Interpretive Summary: In this review we discuss the reasons that, despite ~30 years of sustained effort in the commercial, non-profit, academic and governmental sectors, we have not managed to create widely grown commercial varieties carrying disease resistance traits that were engineered using biotechnological approaches. We also try to derive some lessons from this experience.

Technical Abstract: More than forty years since the era of transgenic plants began and more than thirty years after the cloning of the first plant disease resistance genes, despite extensive progress in our mechanistic understanding and despite considerable sustained efforts in the commercial, non-profit, academic and governmental sectors, the prospect of commercially-viable plant varieties carrying disease resistance traits endowed by biotechnological approaches, remains elusive. The cost of complying with the regulations governing the release of transgenic plants is often cited as the main reason for this lack of success. However, other transgenic traits have been successfully commercialized. We argue that a significant portion of the challenges of producing crop varieties engineered for disease resistance are intrinsic to the trait itself. In this review, we briefly discuss the main approaches used to engineer plant disease resistance. We further discuss possible reasons why they have not been successful in a commercial context and, finally, we try to derive some lessons from all this.