Sabotaging plans of attack
Our current pesticides with retirement. Then we need good alternatives. To develop these researchers like to know more about how a pest is creating its advantage. This, German researchers analysed for the fungus botrytis.
Botrytis infects a whole range of plants, and covers them with a grey mold. As part of its attack strategy this fungus is sending packages with small pieces of RNA into the plant. After arrival the gene-regulation mechanism of the plant is picking them up. Which switches off the matching plant genes.
The team of researchers studied this in more detail. Starting with finding the proteins responsible for making the small pieces of RNA found in the packages. For this they had three candidates. They created fungi without one of the three candidates and use them to infect plants. The absence of one of those candidates, RDR1, resulted in a fungus that infected plants less well.
RNA-fishing-rods to sabotage the fungus attack plan
It turned out that the RDR1 deficient fungi is sending less RNA-packages to the plant. The sending of these packages appears even to be a crucial part of the infection strategy of the fungus. This was confirmed when the researchers gave plants a fungal-RNA-fishing-rod, using this the plant could fish out the fungal RNA pieces present in the cell. Had the plants a fungal-RNA-fishing-rod, then the fungus infected the plants less well.
With this study the researchers not only found a crucial part of the fungus infection strategy. But also found a way to sabotage this plan. By using RNA-fishing-rods we can protect plants against pest for which sending RNA packages is an essential part of their plan of attack.
Literature
Cheng AP, Lederer B, Oberkofler L, Huang L, Johnson NR, et al. (2023) A fungal RNA-dependent RNA polymerase is a novel player in plant infection and cross-kingdom RNA interference. PLOS Pathogens 19(12): e1011885. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.ppat.1011885
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