Department of Biology, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN 47405, USA.
Science. 2016 Feb 12;351(6274):684-7. doi: 10.1126/science.aad3436.
Maintaining high crop yields in an environmentally sustainable manner requires the development of disease-resistant crop varieties. We describe a method to engineer disease resistance in plants by means of an endogenous disease resistance gene from Arabidopsis thaliana named RPS5, which encodes a nucleotide-binding leucine-rich repeat (NLR) protein. RPS5 is normally activated when a second host protein, PBS1, is cleaved by the pathogen-secreted protease AvrPphB. We show that the AvrPphB cleavage site within PBS1 can be substituted with cleavage sites for other pathogen proteases, which then enables RPS5 to be activated by these proteases, thereby conferring resistance to new pathogens. This "decoy" approach may be applicable to other NLR proteins and should enable engineering of resistance in plants to diseases for which we currently lack robust genetic resistance.
以环境可持续的方式保持高作物产量需要开发具有抗病性的作物品种。我们描述了一种通过拟南芥中的内源性抗病基因 RPS5 工程化植物抗病性的方法，该基因编码一种核苷酸结合亮氨酸丰富重复（NLR）蛋白。当第二个宿主蛋白 PBS1 被病原体分泌的蛋白酶 AvrPphB 切割时，RPS5 通常会被激活。我们表明，PBS1 内的 AvrPphB 切割位点可以被其他病原体蛋白酶的切割位点取代，然后使 RPS5 能够被这些蛋白酶激活，从而赋予对新病原体的抗性。这种“诱饵”方法可能适用于其他 NLR 蛋白，并且应该能够为我们目前缺乏强大遗传抗性的疾病工程化植物抗性。
