SBIR Phase I: Engineering broad-spectrum disease resistance in soybean without fitness cost

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) project is to develop disease resistant soybean varieties that will reduce the substantial losses in agricultural production caused by plant diseases. Loss to disease can be as high as 40% globally and cost billions of dollars annually. In soybean alone, an estimated $3 billion dollars of production value is lost from plant diseases annually. In addition, the destruction of crops by plant diseases threatens global food security and has a significant negative impact on the environment due to the use of pesticides. Application of a tunable, broad-spectrum disease resistance strategy in agriculturally important crops will have a major societal impact by protecting crops from devastating diseases for which alternative solutions are not currently available, securing agricultural production, and reducing environmental pollution from agricultural chemicals. In the future, the goal is to apply the proposed technology to other agriculturally important crops such as corn, rice, and tomato. The intellectual merit of this SBIR Phase I project is to engineer tunable, broad-spectrum disease resistant soybean varieties. In this project, a soybean immune regulatory cassette will be constructed through sequence homology, and then functionally validated by demonstrating pathogen-inducible resistance against various diseases with minimal yield penalty. The methods that will be used in this project include bioinformatic analysis of soybean sequences to identify homologous defense genes and corresponding regulatory elements, molecular cloning, transformation of both Arabidopsis and Soybean plants, and testing the resulting transformant plants to determine levels of resistance to different types of pathogens. Results from this project will be essential for moving forward with larger field trials, which to be accomplished in the Phase II of the project. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.