Abstract
Pest and pathogens cause an estimated loss of about 40% of global agricultural production (FAO, 2020). Current events have highlighted the need to increase the productivity capacity of crops in Europe, to reduce the import de-pendency for food demands from other countries. The European Green New Deal sets an ambitious goal: agricul-tural production must be achieved with less environmental impact, also by reducing the use of pesticides. In this regard, the availability of resistant or tolerant crop varieties represents an effective way to decrease the risk of plant diseases and food loss, limiting the use of pesticides. The actors involved in this project propose a solution to control serious diseases that cause severe economic losses and require massive use of fungicides for their management in important fruit crops for our country: i) grapevine, mostly challenged by grey mold and downy mildew, caused by Botrytis cinerea and Plasmopara viticola, respective-ly; and ii) pear, highly compromised by the brown spot disease caused by Stemphylium vesicarium. The strategy we propose is based on host-induced gene silencing technique (HIGS), an RNA interference (RNAi)-based process where small non-coding RNAs are generated by (dsRNA)-expressing constructs to silence key genes of invading pests or pathogens in a sequence specific manner. Among the strength points of this project, well de-veloped protocols suited to obtain HIGS grapevine and pear plant species, and already available HIGS grapevine plants are included, which can be used immediately at the beginning of the project. In particular, advanced studies on dsRNA function, mobility and efficacy against target pathogens will be conducted on the available HIGS-based grapevine plants, namely a number of Thompson cultivar seedless grapevine lines and one rootstock stably expressing dsRNAs against target genes of B. cinerea and P. viticola. Besides the interest in obtaining tolerant/resistant plants against target pathogens, our project will also allow im-portant advancement in the basic knowledge on cross-kingdom RNAi, that involves bi-directional exchange of small RNAs (sRNAs) between plants and their pathogens. In addition, another important goal of the project is to transfer the know-how achieved in grapevine studies, to the pear system. In summary, the project’s objectives are: 1) Plant phenotyping and evaluation of the tolerance/resistance to B. cinerea and P. viticola of self-rooted and grafted HIGS grapevine plants. 2) Investigation on RNAi cross-kingdom mechanisms involved in the host-pathogen interaction, and RNAi-signal mobility in self-rooted and grafted HIGS grapevine plants. 3) Gene constructs design and production, and generation of stably HIGS pear plants tolerant/resistant to S. vesi-carium. The 3 research units involved in the project have advanced interdisciplinary and complementary competences and will provide the expertise needed to achieve the expected outputs planned in the project.
Project details
Unibo Team Leader: Elena Baraldi
Unibo involved Department/s:
Dipartimento di Scienze e Tecnologie Agro-Alimentari
Coordinator:
Università Politecnica delle Marche(Italy)
Total Unibo Contribution: Euro (EUR) 62.585,00
Project Duration in months: 24
Start Date:
12/10/2023
End Date:
28/02/2026
