ISHS Acta Horticulturae 764: XXVII International Horticultural Congress - IHC2006: International Symposium on Plant Biotechnology: From Bench to Commercialization
EFFICIENCY OF PRUNUS TRANSFORMATION FOR PPV-RESISTANCE BY GENE SILENCING AND PPV COAT PROTEIN GENE STRATEGIES |
| Authors: | C. Damiano, S. Monticelli, A. Gentile, E. Di Nicola-Negri, V. Ilardi |
| Keywords: | genetic engineering, GUS expression, NPTII, regeneration, RNAi, sharka, stone fruits |
| Abstract:
Sharka, caused by plum pox virus, is the most devastating disease of stone fruit. Breeding programs for sharka resistance are constrained by the lack of resistant cultivars and by the polygenic nature of the resistance trait. The ectopic expression of viral sequences in the plant can induce resistance to the virus and genetic transformation offers a useful tool to this purpose. Transgenic expression of pathogen-derived sequences encoding self-complementary “hairpin” RNA that undergo an efficient and predictable post-transcriptional silencing is an agriculturally sustainable strategy to obtain virus-resistant plants, stopping the production of transgenic viral proteins. In a previous work by Di Nicola-Negri et al. (2005) four PPV-derived gene constructs based on “hairpin” RNAi technology were successfully used to induce high resistance to PPV infection in Nicotiana benthamiana plants. In order to induce sharka resistance in stone fruits, zygotic tissue coming from mature seeds of apricot and peach genotypes were transformed through Agrobacterium tumefaciens infections with the above-mentioned RNAi constructs and with a construct containing the full PPV coat protein gene. Regeneration and transformation efficiency are discussed. | |
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