APPLYING WHAT WE'VE LEARNED TO GENETIC ENGINEERING
Because basic compatibility is a highly-specialized form
of symbiosis, anything that perturbs that symbiosis is potentially useful
for plant defense.
Plant defenses consist of two main components:
-
defense proteins (eg. phenylpropanoid
pathway, oxidative burst, antifungal/antibacterial proteins)
-
regulatory pathways (eg. R genes,
DNA binding proteins, promoter elements)
The goal of genetic engineering should be not to design a
single, ideal defense mechanism. Genetic engineering of plant defense should
aim to generate a diversity of defenses that
can be used interchangeably to prevent adaptation
of the pathogen to restore compatibility. (For example, pathogens will
overcome single resistance genes).
We can generate diverse forms of defense by trying different
combinations of regulatory and coding sequences.
| Regulatory sequence |
Coding
sequence |
| constitutive |
endogenous |
| foreign |
| endogenous |
endogenous |
| foreign |
| foreign |
endogenous |
| foreign |
