LONDON, (Reuters) – An international team of  scientists has managed to transfer disease resistance from one  plant family to another, offering broader protection from  potentially costly and destructive pests.

A team led by Cyril Zipfel at Britain’s Sainsbury Laboratory  found that transferring a single gene from a wild plant to  disease-susceptible crop plants made them more robust against  infections like bacterial wilt and other diseases.

If the results can be duplicated more widely, they could  help prevent massive crop losses and avoid environmental, health  and financial costs associated with using pesticides, the  researchers wrote in the Nature Biotechnology journal on Sunday.

“The implications for engineering crop plants with enhanced  resistance to infectious diseases are very promising,” Sophien  Kamoun, head of the Sainsbury Laboratory, said in a commentary.

The team is already extending its work to several crop  plants, including potato, apple, cassava and banana — all of  which suffer from damaging bacterial diseases, particularly in  the developing world.

The Consultative Group on International Agricultural  Research (CGIAR) said last year that bacterial wilt disease had  been found in bananas in Ethiopia, Uganda, Rwanda, Kenya,  Tanzania and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Uganda, Africa’s leading banana grower and consumer, has  suffered with the disease since 2001 and it causes losses of  between $70 million and $200 million annually, according to  CGIAR.

Zipfel’s team, which included Dutch, French and American  researchers, explained in the study that breeding programmes for  plant disease resistance usually focus on single genes in crop  plants that could fight a particular strain of bug.
This resistance usually breaks down in field-grown crops as  the pest finds ways to outwit the plant.