Alpaca-derived antibodies could protect plants from disease

COVID-19 has tragically given many people a crash course in the importance of antibodies, pathogen-targeting proteins produced by the sophisticated immune systems of humans and other animals. Now, researchers from a U.K. plant research institute have found a way to endow plants with an antibody-based defense for a specific threat, potentially speeding the creation of crops resistant to any kind of emerging virus, bacterium, or fungus. “It’s a really creative and bold approach,” says Jeff Dangl, a plant immunologist at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Roger Innes, a plant geneticist at Indiana University, Bloomington, adds: “This would be much, much faster than standard plant breeding and hopefully much more effective.” The strategy is to inoculate an alpaca or other camel relative with a protein from the plant pathogen to be targeted, purify the unusually small antibodies they produce, and engineer the corresponding gene segment for them into a plant’s own immune gene. In a proof of concept described today in Science , this approach equipped a model plant species with immunity against an engineered version of a virus that infects potatoes and related crops. Farmers lose many billions of dollars to plant diseases each year, and emerging pathogens pose new threats to food security in the developing world. Plants have evolved their own multipronged immune system, kick-started by cell receptors that recognize general...
Source: ScienceNOW - Category: Science Source Type: news