A SWEET solution to rice blight

Good news!

What is so annoying is that reputable science publications like Nature do not even bother to make the abstract of their paywalled papers public! What a shame!

"One dangerous threat to food security is the rice disease bacterial blight, caused by the bacterium Xanthomonas oryzae pv. oryzae (Xoo). The annual losses caused by bacterial blight are estimated at U.S. $3.6 billion in India alone. ... Some rice varieties are resistant against some specific types of Xoo bacteria. The team had previously determined that these varieties contain variants of the SWEET promoter, which do not allow binding of the bacterial TAL effectors. ... he consortium identified six points of attack in the SWEET promoters. Wolf B. Frommer, the project leader, said, "With the knowledge gained and the tools developed here, we might be at least as fast in developing new resistances as the bacteria can develop new keys."

In two back-to-back publications in the journal Nature Biotechnology, Healthy Crops present a series of variants collected from all over the world for two popular rice varieties that are resistant to a large collection of Xoo strains that cause bacterial blight disease. It also describes the Sweetr-Resistance Kit that enables rapid characterization of new bacterial strains to devise a rapid and well-targeted deployment strategy of new resistances to defeat the disease also in the long term.. This kit should soon be available to rice growers and researchers in Asia and sub-Saharan Africa."


A SWEET solution to rice blight | Nature Biotechnology: Two studies offer a powerful strategy for combating bacterial blight in rice.


Research team wants to eliminate dangerous plant diseases in rice