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AGRICULTURAL BIOTECHNOLOGY

A SWEET solution to rice blight

Nature Biotechnology volume 37, pages 1280–1282 (2019)Cite this article

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Two studies offer a powerful strategy for combating bacterial blight in rice.

Bacterial blight is an important disease of rice that is particularly destructive in Southeast Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, exacerbated by the heavy rains of the monsoon seasons. Estimated crop loss due to bacterial blight may be as high as 75%, with millions of hectares of rice affected annually. In this issue, an international team of researchers describes the use of CRISPR editing to generate rice plants that are broadly resistant to the main pathogen that causes rice blight, Xanthomonas oryzae pv. oryzae (Xoo)1. To enhance the durability and management of resistance, the team has also developed a kit to trace the disease, and its virulence and resistance alleles2.

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Fig. 1: Overview of the development of genome-edited lines for key SWEET genes and features of a diagnostic kit for combating bacterial blight rice.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Center of Excellence in Genomics & Systems Biology, International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT), Patancheru, India

    Rajeev K. Varshney

  2. Centre for Crop Science, QAAFI, University of Queensland, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia

    Ian D. Godwin

  3. Indian Council of Agricultural Research, Krishi Bhawan, New Delhi, India

    Trilochan Mohapatra

  4. The Sainsbury Laboratory, Norwich Research Park, Norwich, UK

    Jonathan D. G. Jones

  5. Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA

    Susan R. McCouch

Authors
  1. Rajeev K. Varshney
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  2. Ian D. Godwin
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  3. Trilochan Mohapatra
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  4. Jonathan D. G. Jones
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  5. Susan R. McCouch
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Correspondence to Rajeev K. Varshney.

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Varshney, R.K., Godwin, I.D., Mohapatra, T. et al. A SWEET solution to rice blight. Nat Biotechnol 37, 1280–1282 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41587-019-0302-0

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41587-019-0302-0

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