Insect Resistance in Crop Plants

Next-Generation Insect-Resistant Plants: RNAi-Mediated Crop Protection.

Plant-mediated RNA interference (RNAi) shows great potential in crop protection. It relies on plants stably expressing double-stranded RNAs (dsRNAs) that target essential genes in pest insects. Practical application of this strategy is challenging because producing sufficient amounts of stable dsRNA in plants has proven to be difficult to achieve with conventional transgenesis. In addition, man...

Genetics and genetic improvement of drought resistance in crop plants

Drought limits the agricultural production by preventing the crop plants from expressing their full genetic potential. Three mechanisms, namely drought escape, drought avoidance and drought tolerance are involved in drought resistance. Various morphological, physiological and biochemical characters confer drought resistance. Morphological and physiological characters show different types of inh...

Transgenic approaches to microbial disease resistance in crop plants.

Recent progress in the genetic dissection of plant disease resistance signaling pathways has opened a number of new avenues towards engineering pathogen resistance in crops. Genes controlling race-specific and broad-spectrum resistance responses have been cloned, and novel induced resistance pathways have been identified in model and crop systems. Advances continue to be made in identification ...

Enhanced Methanol Production in Plants Provides Broad Spectrum Insect Resistance

Plants naturally emit methanol as volatile organic compound. Methanol is toxic to insect pests; but the quantity produced by most of the plants is not enough to protect them against invading insect pests. In the present study, we demonstrated that the over-expression of pectin methylesterase, derived from Arabidopsis thaliana and Aspergillus niger, in transgenic tobacco plants enhances methanol...

Biotechnological Solutions for Enhancing the Aluminium Resistance of Crop Plants