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Can natural gene drives be part of future fungal pathogen control strategies in plants?
Author(s) -
Gardiner Donald M.,
Rusu Anca,
Barrett Luke,
Hunter Gavin C.,
Kazan Kemal
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
new phytologist
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 3.742
H-Index - 244
eISSN - 1469-8137
pISSN - 0028-646X
DOI - 10.1111/nph.16779
Subject(s) - biology , gene , gene drive , genetics , population , pathogen , genome , mechanism (biology) , fungal pathogen , fungus , microbiology and biotechnology , computational biology , botany , crispr , philosophy , demography , epistemology , sociology
Summary Globally, fungal pathogens cause enormous crop losses and current control practices are not always effective, economical or environmentally sustainable. Tools enabling genetic management of wild pathogen populations could potentially solve many problems associated with plant diseases. A natural gene drive from a heterologous species can be used in the globally important cereal pathogen Fusarium graminearum to remove pathogenic traits from contained populations of the fungus. The gene drive element became fixed in a freely crossing population in only three generations. Repeat‐induced point mutation (RIP), a natural genome defence mechanism in fungi that causes C to T mutations during meiosis in highly similar sequences, may be useful to recall the gene drive following release, should a failsafe mechanism be required. We propose that gene drive technology is a potential tool to control plant pathogens once its efficacy is demonstrated under natural settings.