Silence! - Researchers are using gene-silencing to produce disease resistance in a number of crops

摘要

Crown gall has always been a problem for many fruits and nuts, especially apples, grapevines, and walnuts. But this may not be the case in the near future. Researchers at the University of California-Davis (UC-Davis) have produced plant resistance tothis disease. Professor Abhaya Dandekar and doctoral candidate Matthew Escobar, both of the UC-Davis pomology department, discovered that a technique known as gene-silencing can interrupt the tumor formation process in crown gall disease. "This technique may be used to produce disease resistance in plants, but we were surprised to discover just how well it works in crown gall," Dandekar says. The researchers targeted two genes that are key to tumor formation. Gene-silencing basically turns these bacterial genes off, preventing galls from forming on the plants.