Abstract

Mutational Genomics to accelerate Disease Resistance Gene Cloning in Complex Plant Genome

Sambasivam Periyannan, Research Scientist, CSIRO Agriculture & Food, Australia

Disease caused by plant pathogenic bacteria, fungi and viruses are a major threat to global agriculture. To survive the battle with these enemies, plants have co-evolved genetic mechanisms to resist their damages which indeed is explored for the management of diseases in commercial crop cultivation. However identification and transfer of these high valued genetic resistance traits into commercial lines is a tiresome breeding process particularly when the source of resistance is from a wild related species of the cultivated crop. Therefore to overcome the difficulties and to accelerate the generation of disease resistant cultivars, here we introduce a rapid gene identification tool called “Mutagenesis, Resistance Gene Enrichment and Sequencing (MutRenSeq)”. As the name indicates it’s a three simple step process which is based on the combination of mutagenesis and gene capture. The pipeline was successfully validated through the isolation of two stem rust disease resistance gene from the complex 17 Gb wheat genome. Apart from wheat, the technology is currently been explored for isolation of both disease and pest resistant genes in other agriculturally important crops such as barley, soybean, rye, potato, tomato and canola etc.