Kids: Fierce fungus fighters
Purdue and USDA-ARS scientists Guri Johal (front), Steve Scofield (at left) and Michael Zanis. (Purdue Agricultural Communication photo/Tom Campbell)
Steve Scofield of the U.S. Department of Agriculture and his colleagues at Purdue University have discovered a plant gene that has protected grains such as wheat, rice, and corn against a deadly, disease-causing fungus for millions of years.
According to Scofield, the discovery of this fungus-fighting gene is a great example of “how effective disease resistance can be in plants and how important that is for us who depend on those plants.”
This work could lead geneticists to new strategies for protecting grains that are so vital for Earth’s food supply.
“If you wanted to design a durable resistance system in a plant,” says Scofield, “you would need to identify some component of whatever the pathogen had to have to be an effective pathogen, and design the resistance mechanism around destruction or recognition of that essential pathogen molecule.”
In other words, geneticists could study how the fungus-fighting gene recognizes and destroys the disease, and possibly apply this knowledge toward helping other food plants fend off a fungus attack.
Scofield believes that our species owes its survival in part to the strength of the disease-resistant gene in grains.
Scofield adds, “That’s what I think is really cool about this story, is people look at plants and think they’re rather static organisms, but they’re actually being challenged all the time by different pathogens.”
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