Improvement of resistance to plant pathogens and pests by DNA technology.

Peter P. Ueng

U.S. Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Research Service, Beltsville Agricultural Research Center, Beltsville, MD, 20705 USA (United States)

Shaw-Yhi Hwang

Department of Entomology, National Chung-hsing University, Taichung 40227, Taiwan (Taiwan, Province of China)

Man-Miao Yang

Department of Entomology, National Chung-hsing University, Taichung 40227, Taiwan (Taiwan, Province of China)

Kai-Rong Cui

State Key Laboratory of Arid Agroecology, Lanzhou University, China (China)

Hei-Ti Hsu

U.S. Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Research Service, Beltsville Agricultural Research Center, Beltsville, MD, 20705 USA (United States)

Abstract

To improve crop yield, DNA technology has been used to enhance plant resistance toward pathogens and pests. Genes identified through understanding of host-pathogen interactions in viral, bacterial and fungal diseases, the mechanism of hypersensitive reaction in Arabidopsis and insect toxicity of natural peptides are used for their expression in plants. Progress on the use of simple sequence repeats (SSR) markers for resistance gene identification, development of virus-specific antibody gene expression in plants for virus control, construction of genes for multi-pathogen resistance, and use of viral vectors for gene efficiency evaluation are discussed.