Enhancing pathogen resistance in crops

Projected increases in world population and a changing climate make future food security an increasingly important global and national issue. The FAO estimates that up to 40% of global crop production is lost each year to plant pests and diseases, both pre- and post-harvest. The big challenge is therefore to breed crops with enhanced tolerance to plant pathogens (disease-causing organisms), and other adverse environmental conditions such as heat waves or frosts, without adversely compromising crop yield.

The endoplasmic reticulum (ER) is the major protein factory present in every plant cell.

Dr Emily Breeze  has studied in detail the changes that occur to both the ER architecture and its ability to remodel when a bacterial pathogen infects plant leaves and has identified ER architectures that appeared to help defend the plant against the invading pathogen. From this information Dr Breeze and collaborators at the University of Warwick and University of Oxford have started to develop a ‘blueprint’ for a more favourable ER configuration which the group have used to generate a collection of ‘smart’ plants, the so-called ELMER (Environment-Led Manipulation of ER) lines, which are capable of rapidly modifying their ER into a bespoke form that is better suited to withstand pathogen attack.

Funding provided by the Medical and Life Sciences Research Fund will allow the study of ELMER smart plants in detail to characterise exactly how, when and to what extent the ER changes its form during the course of a pathogen infection and assess the impact that these changes in ER form have on the plant, both positive in terms of making the plants more resistant to disease but also any negative impacts on their normal growth and development. The hope is to ultimately use this approach to breed crop plants with enhanced disease resistance to reduce crop losses, and to further extend it to generate plants that can better tolerate other adverse and/or extreme environmental conditions that are becoming increasingly prevalent as a result of climate change.