Engineering Pathogen-Resistant Crops using

Directed Evolution

We use directed evolution to disrupt interaction between pathogenic proteins and plants’ immune system.

Worldwide, 20-40% of crop yield is lost to pests, costing the global economy a combined $290 billion per year. Pesticides are currently the most commonly used protection mechanism, but they have a huge negative impact on the environment and pose health risks to humans.

Challenge

30%

Our Approach

We will disrupt the pathogen-plant interaction between a pathogen recognition receptor (PRR) of the plant immune system and a bacterial effector protein that supresses the PRR. Interaction will be disrupted using directed evolution. We will generate a library of PRR mutants and select for reduced binding affinity using a modified yeast two-hybrid screen. Best mutants will be transiently expressed in plant cells for the final validation.

Expected Result

Identified mutations can be introduced into plants using CRISPR-based precision gene editing. This way, it is possible to generate non-transgenic strains, which don’t contain any mutations or genes that couldn’t occur in the plant naturally. Under the new EU regulation such plants won’t be considered GMOs in the future.

Our Advisor

Prof. Dr. Cyril Zipfel
University of Zurich
Department of Plant and Microbial Biology

Our project is supervised and supported by Prof. Dr. Cyril Zipfel’s Research Group at UZH, which studies how plants perceive their environment and respond appropriately to coordinate their growth and development in the face of external challenges. Specifically the group is focusing on cell surface-localised immune receptors – called pattern recognition receptors – that perceive microbe-derived or endogenous patterns to activate innate immune responses.

Our project hopes to collaborate with Prof Zipfel’s group to utilize Directed Evolution to address unmet challenges with identification and engineering of immune receptors to improve disease resistance in crops.