RasGEFs Play Essential Roles in the Biology of Sclerotinia sclerotiorum and Botrytis cinerea and Can Be Used as HIGS Targets for Disease Management.
Tan J, Tian L, Gong Z, Xu Y, Xia S
Crop Improvement
White mold quietly devastates backyard bean patches and sunflower beds every wet summer, and conventional fungicides often can't keep up—this research opens a path to breeding plants that silence the fungus's own genes before it can take hold.
Two notorious molds—one that rots stems and leaves a white fuzzy coating on plants, another that causes gray mold on flowers and fruit—rely on a set of molecular switches to grow and spread. Researchers figured out that knocking out these switches cripples the fungi, preventing them from forming the tough dormant blobs that survive in soil for years and from successfully attacking plants. They then showed that plants engineered to produce a signal that shuts off these switches got significantly less sick, suggesting a future where crops protect themselves from the inside out.
Key Findings
Four RasGEF proteins were identified as essential in both Sclerotinia sclerotiorum and Botrytis cinerea; deleting RasGEFa caused the most severe defects in growth, reproduction, and infection ability in both fungi.
RasGEFa appears to function upstream of the SMK1 MAPK signaling pathway, placing it at a key regulatory hub controlling fungal development and virulence.
Plants engineered to express double-stranded RNA targeting SsRasGEFa and SsRasGEFc showed significantly reduced disease symptoms, validating these proteins as functional HIGS (host-induced gene silencing) targets.
chevron_right Technical Summary
Scientists identified four proteins called RasGEFs that fungal pathogens—responsible for white mold and gray mold—need to grow, form survival structures, and infect plants. Engineering crop plants to silence these fungal genes dramatically reduced disease, pointing toward a durable, chemical-free disease management strategy.
Abstract Preview
Sclerotinia sclerotiorum is a notorious soilborne fungal pathogen that causes serious yield losses in many economically important crops such as canola, beans, lettuce, and sunflower. The diseases i...
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