One gene gives wheat triple disease resistance, yield intact
Sun S, Li C, Wang Z, Ma C, Niu X
Crispr
Bread wheat losses to fungal blights and rust push prices up and threaten harvests worldwide, and this discovery hints at a way to protect crops without the usual yield penalty that's plagued disease-resistance breeding for decades.
Wheat plants have a gene called TaXAX1 that helps build thicker, tougher cell walls by adding sugar decorations to a wall component called xylan. When scientists boosted this gene, the wheat plants fought off three different fungal diseases and had sturdier, less bendy stems, all while producing just as much grain as normal plants. It's a rare case where a plant got stronger defenses without paying the usual price in lower yield.
Key Findings
Knocking out TaXAX1 with CRISPR/Cas9 made wheat more vulnerable to Fusarium head blight, Fusarium crown rot, and stripe rust.
Overexpressing TaXAX1 boosted resistance to all three fungal diseases simultaneously with no reduction in grain yield.
TaXAX1 increases xylan arabinosylation and activates the phenylpropanoid pathway, thickening secondary cell walls with more lignin, cellulose, and phenolic cross-linkers, which also strengthened stems against lodging.
chevron_right Technical Summary
Scientists found a single wheat gene that can be dialed up to fight off three major fungal diseases at once, without shrinking the harvest, by making the plant's cell walls tougher.
Abstract Preview
Original paper
Multiplexed Engineering of Disease Resistance and Lodging Tolerance in Wheat Via a Single Xylan Modifying Glycosyltransferase.
Breeding crops with robust disease resistance often compromises yield, a persistent challenge in agricultural improvement. We report that modifying cell wall architecture through a xylan-specific g...
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