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:

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