Biotechnological Resources to Increase Disease-Resistance by Improving Plant Immunity: A Sustainable Approach to Save Cereal Crop Production

Abstract

Plant diseases are globally causing substantial losses in staple crop production, undermining the urgent goal of a 60% increase needed to meet the food demand, a task made more challenging by the climate changes. Main consequences concern the reduction of food amount and quality. Crop diseases also compromise food safety due to the presence of pesticides and/or toxins. Nowadays, biotechnology represents our best resource both for protecting crop yield and for a science-based increased sustainability in agriculture. Over the last decades, agricultural biotechnologies have made important progress based on the diffusion of new, fast and efficient technologies, offering a broad spectrum of options for understanding plant molecular mechanisms and breeding. This knowledge is accelerating the identification of key resistance traits to be rapidly and efficiently transferred and applied in crop breeding programs. This review gathers examples of how disease resistance may be implemented in cereals by exploiting a combination of basic research derived knowledge with fast and precise genetic engineering techniques. Priming and/or boosting the immune system in crops represent a sustainable, rapid and effective way to save part of the global harvest currently lost to diseases and to prevent food contamination.

CRISPR towards a Sustainable Agriculture

“…Among the agricultural applications, several targets of CRISPR are related to the achievement of abiotic or biotic stress tolerance [113,114]. Generally, crop plants are able to overcome both biotic or abiotic stresses through changes that occur at the morphological, physiological, biochemical and molecular level [115]. However, the development of CRISPR may involve simple or complex mutations or the integration of specific genes in the target genome that may increase the breeding efficiency and the development of plant traits that were previously difficult to obtain [111,115].…”

Plant–Microbe Interaction: Aboveground to Belowground, from the Good to the Bad

“…Delmont’s [ 250 ] 2009–2012 survey of Park Grass, for example, employed at least six distinct techniques of DNA extraction to produce an accurate representation of the soil microbiome. The genomic and post genomic era is upon us, and we are now faced with this large amount of data that needs to be deciphered and utilized in the development of disease resistance in plants, as well as in improving our understanding of ISR and SAR [ 249 , 251 , 252 , 253 ]. It is now possible to dissect and scrutinize the plant-microbe interaction at a molecular level through the utilization of platforms of genomics, proteomics, transcriptomics, and metabolomics.…”

The Triple Jags of Dietary Fibers in Cereals: How Biotechnology Is Longing for High FiberGrains

“…Notably, in rice a collection of loss of function mutants spanning the genome has been generated, converting CRISPR-Cas into a high-throughput tool for mutagenesis ( Lu et al, 2017 ). This approach is of interest to generate further genetic variability essential in plant genetic improvement ( Bigini et al, 2021 ); in the coming years, the advantages of a CRISPR-Cas induced mutagenesis would be investigated in comparison with other well-established resources such as Targeting Induced Local Lesions IN Genomes (TILLING) ( McCallum et al, 2000 ). Although CRISPR-Cas has revolutionary perspectives, it cannot be done without more classical resources that, over the decades, have allowed to exploit and tag the genome of the organisms associating DNA features to the phenotype: molecular markers have evolved incessantly assuming many forms that, the in last decade, have enormously taken advantage by high-throughput sequencing technologies ( Figure 4 ).…”