A defense-inducible bidirectional promoter enables disease-resistance engineering in Arabidopsis without growth trade-offs.
Lin XX, Li C, Gong BQ, Liu JJ, Zhu LY
Crispr
Tomatoes, peppers, and other crops engineered with this switch could resist devastating bacterial wilts and fungal blights without the stunted, low-yielding plants that previous disease-resistance breeding has often produced.
Plants normally face a tough choice: grow fast or defend against disease, but rarely both at the same time. Researchers found a tiny genetic switch in a common lab plant that stays quiet during healthy growth but flips on to power up defenses the moment a pathogen shows up. They used gene-editing scissors (CRISPR) to install this switch next to two key immune genes, producing plants that grew normally yet fought off four different disease-causing bacteria and fungi.
Key Findings
BiPro1 is a compact 313-base-pair bidirectional promoter that drives immune gene expression in response to bacterial and fungal danger signals without causing growth defects under normal conditions.
CRISPR-edited plants carrying BiPro1 showed significantly elevated resistance to four pathogens: Pseudomonas syringae, Ralstonia solanacearum, Botrytis cinerea, and Verticillium dahliae.
The promoter responds to both bacterial flagellin peptide (flg22) and fungal chitin oligosaccharides, giving it broad-spectrum utility across different types of plant disease.
chevron_right Technical Summary
Scientists engineered a molecular "on-switch" called BiPro1 that activates plant immune genes only when disease threatens, allowing crops to fight off multiple pathogens without sacrificing growth or yield.
Abstract Preview
The defense-growth trade-off remains a central challenge in crop breeding. For molecular breeding of crop disease resistance, immune-inducible promoters are valuable tools, as constitutive expressi...
open_in_new Read full abstractAbstract copyright held by the original publisher.
Species Mentioned
Was this useful?
Chloroplast Genome Editing Eliminates Gluten Immunogenicity in Triticum aestivum
It could mean that people with celiac disease — roughly 1 in 100 worldwide — may one day safely eat bread made from real wheat, without sacrificing the taste...
Arabidopsis (rockcress) is a genus of small flowering plants in the cabbage and mustard family, Brassicaceae. Arabidopsis species are native to temperate and subarctic Eurasia and North America, North Africa, and the mountains of eastern tropical Africa. This genus is of great interest since it c...