Discovery offers hope of saving sub-Saharan crops from devastating parasites
FOR RELEASE from the UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO
Sept. 10, 2010
University of Toronto discovery offers hope of saving sub-Saharan crops from devastating parasites
TORONTO,
ON - Each year, thousands of acres of crops are planted throughout
Africa, Asia and Australia only to be laid to waste by a parasitic plant
called Striga, also known as witchweed. It is one of the largest
challenges to food security in Africa, and a team of scientists led by
researchers from the University of Toronto have discovered chemicals and
genes that may break Striga’s stranglehold.
When crops grow,
their roots release a plant hormone called strigolactone. If the soil
contains Striga seed, it will use the released strigolactone as a cue to
germinate and infect the crop plants. Once connected to the crop, the
Striga plant kills the crop by sucking out its nutrients. “In
sub-Saharan Africa alone, Striga has infected up to two-thirds of the
arable land,” says U of T cell and systems biologist Peter McCourt,
principal investigator of a study published this week in Nature Chemical Biology.
“With chemicals and genes in hand that influence strigolactone
production in plants, we should be able to manipulate the level of this
compound by chemical application or plant breeding which would break the
Striga-crop interaction.
The scientists used a model genetic
plant system called Arabidopsis to screen 10,000 compounds and identify a
set of five chemicals, designated cotylimides, which increase the
accumulation of strigolactone in plants. They also found related
chemicals that decrease strigolactone levels. From there, they screened
for mutants of Arabidopsis that were resistant to cotylimides and
identified mutants that made less strigolactone. These mutants
identified genes that regulate strigolactone levels in plants.
The full study is available on Nature Chemical Biology's website.
The
research team includes members from the University of Toronto’s
Department of Cell and Systems Biology and Centre for Analysis of Genome
Evolution and Function, as well as the RIKEN Plant Science Center in
Yokahama, Japan.
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MEDIA CONTACTS:
Peter McCourt
Department of Cell and Systems Biology
University of Toronto
416-978-0523 (b)
647-308-1236 (c)
peter.mccourt@utoronto.ca
Kim Luke
Communications, Faculty of Arts & Science
University of Toronto
416-978-4352
kim.luke@utoronto.ca
