Designing Crop Plants for Biotic Stresses using Transgenic Approach

Population growth and climate change posed a challenge to breed designer crops in an environment having biotic and abiotic threats. Though, integrated pest and disease management has placed hopes on host plant resistance, the evolution of new races and biotypes for important pathogens and parasites of plants is still a growing threat to crop production worldwide. Use of agrochemicals for control of crop pests and diseases is however inefficient and environmentally unsound. The conventional host-plant resistance to various biotic stresses involves quantitative traits at several loci. The advent of molecular genetic technologies have advanced our understanding regarding biotic stress resistance mechanisms. With the advent of genetic transformation techniques, it has become possible to clone and insert genes into the crop plants to confer resistance to different biotic stresses. Reinforcement of resistance against insect- pests and pathogens attack using genetic engineering has proven to be an effective strategy to develop resistant crop plants and that could offer a remedy, allowing more precise targeting of pest and disease management. Present paper deals with the reports where the function of a specific gene towards improving the performance of a plant against different biotic stresses like pests, diseases (fungal, bacterial, viral) and nematodes have been analysed using transgenic approach.