A group of researchers at the John Innes Center in the United Kingdom are developing a new method that allows them to rapidly recruit disease resistance genes in wild plants and transfer them to domesticated agricultural crops. Informally called “Rapid Cloning”, the new method could accelerate the fight against pathogens that threaten food crops around the world. Given the circumstances, it allows researchers to find a “library” of resistance genes discovered in wild relatives of modern crops to quickly identify sequences associated with the ability to fight the disease. From there they can use laboratory techniques to clone genes and introduce them into elite varieties of domesticated crops to protect them against pathogens and pests such as rust, powdery mildew and Hess fly. According to Dr. Brande Wulff, project leader at the John Innes Center, by making crops more resistant to disease, “AgRenSeq”, its official name, will help improve yields and reduce pesticide use. “Having the [cloning] technique quickly in our toolkit means that elite crops can be more resilient, which means higher yields and less dependence on pesticides to protect crops,” he comments. “We've found a way to 'scan' the genome of a wild relative of a plant and select the resistance genes we need, and we can do it in record time. This used to be a process that took ten or fifteen years and was like looking for a needle in a haystack. We can now clone these genes in a matter of months and thousands of pounds instead of millions”, he concludes.
Source: agrolink | Author: Leonardo Gottems
