Objective
The striped stemborer (SSB) (Chilo suppressalis) is one of the major constraints affecting rice production in the south european countries, causing yield losses reaching 15 to 20% in Spain and France. To address this problem, heavy chemical treatments as well as sprays with Bacillus thuringiensis insecticidal formulations have proven to be respectively environmentally damaging and of limited efficiency due to their poor persistence and to the biological localisation of the pest which develop in the rice culm. Conventional breeding for that trait has proven to be difficult.
The goal of this project is to develop SSB-resistant rice through transfer of Bacillus thuringiensis (B.t.) genes encoding insecticidal toxins and plant proteinase inhibitor (p.i.)genes into the 2 most widely released rice varieties in Italy, Spain and France. This project comprises:
i. the use and synthesis of sequence-optimized B.t. toxin genes encoding proteins previously identified as specifically active against SSB larvae by affinity and toxicity tests -
ii. the use of maize and soybean protease inhibitor genes -
iii. the construction of vectors for expression of the transferred genes in rice plants, including constitutive promoters conferring high level expression to foreign gene in transgenic rice plants, a vascular tissue-specific promoter of the maize streak virus and wound-inducible promoters of maize and tobacco genes -
iv. the use of transformation systems optimized for 2 Mediterranean elite varieties based on particle bombardment into scutellar cells of immature embryos and embryogenic calluses -
v. the production and bioassay for SSB resistance of transgenic plants containing; a single B.t. gene; a combination of two B.t. genes under the control of a constitutive promoter;one or two B.t. genes under the control of promoters having tissue specific or woundinducible activity; one p.i. gene; two p.i. genes exhibiting complementary specificities for insect proteinases -
vi. the proposition of strategies for deploying the selected transgenic lines in order to delay and hopefully prevent occurrence of resistant forms of SSB -
vii. the assessment of the gene flow rate between transgenic rice and its derived weed form, the red rice.
The deployment of SSB-resistant, elite Mediterranean rice varieties generated in this project will eventually result in a significant decrease of pesticide use in fragile, rice growing areas of south Europe.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
- natural sciencesbiological sciencesmicrobiologyvirology
- natural sciencesbiological sciencesbiochemistrybiomoleculesproteins
- natural sciencesbiological scienceszoologyentomology
- medical and health sciencesclinical medicineembryology
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Topic(s)
Call for proposal
Data not availableFunding Scheme
CSC - Cost-sharing contractsCoordinator
34032 MONTPELLIER
France