Plant diseases are a constant threat to commercial agriculture

Farmers seek to grow disease-resistant crop varieties when possible, but these are not always available and farmers often resort to chemical controls such as fungicides to protect their crops. Fungicides are expensive and have the potential to be hazardous to farm workers, consumers and the environment. By leveraging recent advances in our understanding of the plant immune system, IT is possible to use naturally occurring disease resistance traits to develop crop varieties to be resistant to particular diseases. Our project seeks to develop a commercial tomato variety that is immune to the disease bacterial spot, which is a major problem for commercial tomato growers. We will use four naturally-occurring disease resistance traits from tomato relatives and incorporate them into a commercial tomato variety to confer resistance to bacterial spot. Using four traits together makes IT more difficult for the pathogen to evolve to overcome the resistance. We will test this variety in the laboratory and generate seeds for future field testing. Throughout the project we will be in touch with existing tomato seed companies, tomato growers, and other key stakeholders to ensure the variety will be useful for tomato growers and to disseminate our results. Commercial adoption of this variety will lead to increased tomato yields while also improving the environmental sustainability of tomato cultivation. Successful completion of this project will also clear the way for future efforts to solve additional disease problems in agriculture.