This Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) Phase I project will develop an innovative approach for targeting genes involved in a specific trait or pathway using the model cereal plant, rice. Rice is known to have highly conserved disease resistance signal transduction pathways and yet so far a very few signaling molecules have been studied. Application of Activation Tagging methods may allow for the discovery mechanisms involved in disease and other defense-related signal transduction pathways. Therefore, instead of using the common activation tagging vector, this project proposes to use a rice chitinase gene promoter RCH10 and luciferase reporter gene fusion expression cassette in activation tagging T-DNA binary vector to activate genes in defense-responsive pathways. This approach will allow the identification of chitinase or chitinase-related genes or transcription factors in luc+ expressed rice tissues and plants both at earlier and in later stages of the experiment. The RCH10 gene promoter is highly inducible during pathogen response both in plants and in cell culture and therefore, transformed and non-transformed in vitro tissues and leaf discs can easily be subjected to high throughput screening. This trait-targeted activation tagging approach will enable collection of only chitinase or chitinase-related overexpressed phenotypes and thereby expedite the process of gene isolation and recapitulation of potential disease resistance phenotypes in rice. The commercial applications of this project will be in agriculture for screening and isolation of agronomically important genes in major crops.
