Allele Mining and Expression Profiling of Resistance- and Avirulence- genes in Rice-Blast Pathosystem for Development of Race Non-Specific Disease Resistance

Novel approaches to be followed

Major problem in the management of rice blast using host resistance is the frequent breakdown of resistance because of emergence of new races of the pathogen.  This problem can only be overcome if a novel strategy can be adopted to engineer broad spectrum/non-specific resistance. According to this strategy, if a genes cassette consisting of R-gene and pathogen derived elicitor gene (Avr-gene) is transferred to the plant by putting it  under the control of a  tightly regulated pathogen-responsive plant promoter, it may provide broad spectrum resistance to any invading pathogen/pathogen races. We shall be using this hypothesis in rice blast using Pi-kh blast resistance gene (which we have recently cloned) along with AVR-Pi-kh and a pathogen responsive promoter to be cloned in this project.