This Project Grant award of $760,506.00 from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Agriculture and Food Research Initiative (AFRI) (CFDA 10.310) supports the "FIGHTBLIGHT" research project led by the Boyce Thompson Institute for Plant Research. The overarching goal is to develop new disease resistance traits in potatoes through bioengineering and cisgenic approaches to combat the devastating Phytophthora infestans pathogen that causes potato late blight. The key objectives include: 1) Developing immune decoy receptor scaffolds to target virulent blight strains, 2) Utilizing gene editing techniques for precise engineering of these novel resistance traits, and 3) Field testing the engineered potato varieties for durable blight resistance. This 3-year project, running from February 2025 to January 2028, aims to deliver innovative cisgenic solutions to a major agricultural challenge through collaborative research between the Boyce Thompson Institute, Sainsbury Laboratory, and Leibniz Institute.
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