Plants are basically resistant to any disease(Public Symposium)

Abstract

Plants have been evolved to obtain the ability to induce the cascade of defense response upon exposure to wide variety of plant pathogens. Disease incidence, thus, should be considered as an exceptional event for the plants. One of the most important mechanisms leading to this exceptional event has been shown to be due to the suppression of the induction of defense response of host plants by the pathogen. At least in the case of bacterial pathogens, we found that this suppression was shown to be elicited by most of the avirulence (avr) genes. This rather unexpected finding (ie. dual function of avr genes) has opened a new strategy to construct the plant resistant to any plant diseases by escaping from the suppressor activity conferred by avr gene.