Crossdressing plants to combat major crop diseases

Global food security rely on the monocultural elite crops that must be protected against diseases. Presently, this is achieved using pesticides or by introgression of resistance genes in breeding of new varieties. But pesticides leave unacceptable environmental footprints, breeding new elite cultivars is slow, and resistance genes are overcome by pathogens over time. Hence, there is doubt to whether these methods can ensure food security also in the future.
We wish to overcome this limitation by taking an unconventional approach, combining the defense mechanism from mammalians with the hypersensitivity response from plants, at the molecular level. The result is a generic “genetic plant vaccination platform”, where antibodies recognizing crop diseases can be developed as plant diseases emerge, and deployed by genetic engineering of existing elite crops. This represents a potential solution to the Grand Challenge of Ensuring Global Food Security while minimizing environmental impacts.