What is it about?
Future sustainable crop production will require new approaches to achieve plant disease resistance that is broad-spectrum and long-lasting. Harnessing knowledge of plant defense response gene promoters and the polymorphisms in their regulatory elements that control resistance will provide targets for marker-assisted breeding to improve disease resistance.
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Why is it important?
Disease-induced changes in plant gene expression are controlled by short sequences in the promoter regions, known as cis-regulatory elements (CRE), or by combinations of CREs organized as modules (cis-regulatory modules or CRMs). Conserved CREs and CRMs are found in the promoters of many genes co-activated in plants with enhanced disease resistance. This knowledge forms the basis for the concept that molecular markers can be developed based on shared defense-responsive CREs and CRMs, which can then be used to assist in breeding crop plants for disease resistance. Using these precise markers will enable genome-wide selection of complex resistance traits, allowing for efficient, critical solutions to enhance sustainable food production for a growing global population.
Perspectives
Selection for quantitative disease resistance traits in plants is difficult because the molecular basis for the difference in responsiveness of the genes involved was not known. Knowledge that the variation in the promoters of the genes is responsible for their functional differences, and that this variation is conserved in promoters of co-regulated genes can guide design of markers to accumulate these genes into crop varieties using marker-assisted selection strategies. This means breeding programs can select for quantitative disease resistance traits with confidence that the marker is truly linked to a functional trait.
Jan Leach
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Intergenic spaces: a new frontier to improving plant health, New Phytologist, September 2021, Wiley,
DOI: 10.1111/nph.17706.
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