Abstract
About 13,000 full-length cDNAs of rice were mixed and ligated to an expression vector cassette. They were introduced into Arabidopsis by Agrobacterium-mediated floral dip transformation to generate Rice-Arabidopsis FOX (full-length over-expressor) lines. Three-week-old T2 seedlings of approximately 12,000 FOX lines were screened for resistance to a bacterial pathogen, Pseudomonas syringae pv. tomato DC3000 by dip inoculation. More than 20 resistant lines were selected after 2-3 rounds of screening and the rice cDNAs inserted in their genomes were identified. The rice cDNAs identified by this procedure are being re-transformed into Arabidopsis and rice for overexpression to confirm the disease resistance phenotypes. At present, some rice lines separately overexpressing two of the four cDNAs identified in the screening of the Rice-Arabidopsis FOX lines have shown resistance to the pathogen, Xanthomonas oryzae pv. oryzae, causing rice blight.
