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Poster # 302
Poster Title: Overexpression of Wheat Pore-Forming Toxin-like Gene in Transgenic Plants of Tomato and Strawberry Provides Broad Spectrum Resistance to Fungal Pathogens
Authors: Prem Kumar Ganesan 1, Eman Elagamey 2, Juan Debernardi 3, Shunyuan Xiao1 4, Nidhi Rawat 1
1. Department of Plant Science and Landscape Architecture, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742 USA
2. Plant Pathology Research Institute, Agricultural Research Center (ARC), 9 Gamaa St, Giza, 12619, Egypt
3. Plant Transformation Facility, University of California, Davis, CA- 95616, USA
4. Institute for Bioscience and Biotechnology Research, Rockville, MD 20850, USA
Corresponding author: nidhirwt@umd.edu

Presenting Author:   Prem Kumar Ganesan



Wheat pore-forming toxin-like (PFT) gene was reported by Rawat et al. (2016) previously to provide Fhb1 mediated resistance to Fusarium graminearum infection in resistant wheat cultivar Sumai 3. To investigate the effect of PFT in another plant system, we ectopically expressed it in dicot plant model plant Arabidopsis thaliana, which does not have any PFT ortholog or homolog. PFT gene in the dicot plant Arabidopsis thaliana provided resistance to not only F. graminearum, but to a broad-range of necrotrophic and hemi-biotrophic fungal pathogens including Botrytis cinerea, Colletotrichum higginsianum, and Sclerotinia sclerotiorum. In the present work, the wheat PFT gene was transferred to a diploid tomato cv. Moneymaker and an octaploid strawberry cv. Camerosa. Both of these varieties are susceptible to a number of pathogens. The transgenic tomato plants were challenged with Fusarium oxysporum f. sp. lycopersici, Verticillium dahliae, Alternaria linariae, and Botrytis cinerea. The transgenic strawberry plants were challenged with Botrytis cinerea and Colletotrichum acutatum. In both the experiments, transgenic plants of PFT tomato and strawberry showed significantly less disease severity index and fungal biomass with significant disease resistance against the fungal pathogens tested. This study demonstrates the broad spectrum-resistance of the wheat PFT gene to fungal pathogens in planta irrespective of the plant background. Keywords: Fhb1, Wheat PFT, Tomato, strawberry, broad-spectrum resistance, Fungal pathogens.