A playbook for developing disease resistant crops

At Fortiphyte we are very busy working on identify new disease resistance traits and developing disease resistant crop varieties, but we are also interested in sharing our perspective with the broader scientific community. So I was very excited to be invited to write a review in Current Opinion in Plant Biology about recent advances in the identification of plant disease resistance traits. I worked with University of Washington assistant professor Dr. Adam Steinbrenner to write the review titled “A playbook for developing disease-resistant crops through immune receptor identification and transfer.” We analyzed the approaches used in the recent identification of 75 different immune receptor genes. We found that traditional genetic mapping remains the most common method to identify such genes, but advances in DNA sequencing have allowed increased utilization of reverse genetic and comparative genomic approaches. Once identified, immune receptor genes can be successfully moved between plant varieties or species only if the required signaling components are conserved or transferred along with the gene of interest.