Molecular mechanisms of Strawberry Plant Defence against colletotrichum acutatum
Year: 2013
Type: dissertation
Abstract: This thesis is focused on strawberry molecular studies aimed by the strong economic \nimpact and social staple that represents this crop. With an annual production of 500000 \ntons and an economic weigh of 650 million €, Spain is the third producing country in \nworld (FAOSTAT Agriculture Data [http://faostat.fao.org/]). Important losses in \nstrawberry yields occur due to diseases and pests. Although resistant cultivars are a \npriority of most strawberry breeding programs, completely resistant cultivars have not yet \nbeen reported, relying pathogen control on the excessive use of chemical products \n(mostly environmental contaminants). Despite of the immediate necessity on developing \nnew strategies to improve resistance in this crop plant, molecular knowledge is still scarce \nand most components and mechanisms of the strawberry defense network remain \nunknown and poorly understood. \nThe main aim of this work is to get molecular clues about how plant immunity is \nactivated in strawberry to face pathogen attack. Understanding the molecular interplay \nbetween strawberry plant and microbes will successful contribute to identify candidate \ngenes useful for developing biotechnological strategies and help breeding to increase \nresistance against specific pathogens. This work has been structured in eight chapters \nwhich contributed to mount and exploit new technical platforms to subsequently uncover \nthe strawberry defense response at molecular level. \nChapter I is an intense and comprehensive compendium of all available information \non strawberry immunity, and contribute to the field by discussing, updating and \ncompiling research focused on the molecular aspects and events of the strawberry defense \nmechanisms against pathogens, concluding that major progress in the physiology, \ngenetics and molecular biology of strawberry, is still needed to fully uncover the logic of \nits elaborate plant innate immune system. In this context, the use of high-throughput \ntechnologies will provide large amount of molecular information related with defense \nresponse in strawberry. However, the lack on commercially-available tools focused on \ncrop plants such as strawberry, aimed us to produce our private platforms to be exploited \nin strawberry-based studies, as it is described in Chapter II. Thus, the generation of a \nESTs collection enriched on defense-related genes, which allow the identification of new \ncomponents of strawberry immunity, and provides information on those biological...
Author: Francisco Amil‐Ruíz
Language: English
Subfield: Plant Science
Domain: Life Sciences
SDG: Zero hunger
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W1579690078