Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
C
HAPTER
1
Identifi cation of Fungal
Pathogenicity Genes by
Agrobacterium tumefaciens
-
Mediated Transformation
Karunakaran Maruthachalam, Junhyun Jeon,
Yong-Hwan Lee and Krishna V. Subbarao
Abstract
The fungal genomics field over the past five years has exploited
Agrobacte-
rium tumefaciens
-mediated transformation (ATMT) for targeted and random
mutagenesis to determine the functions of individual genes. Currently, the
technique has become routine for genetic manipulation of a wide range
of fungal species. Because of the higher transformation effi ciency, ease of select-
ing starting materials and generating a large number of stable transformants
within a few weeks, the number of fungi transformed by ATMT
has steadily
grown since 2005. This chapter provides an overview of ATMT
method for
possible functional characterization of pathogenicity genes, mainly focusing on
two phytopathogenic fungal species,
Magnaporthe oryzae
and
Verticillium dahliae
.
INTRODUCTION
Phytopathogenic fungi cause many of the world's most notorious plant
diseases and damage crops worth billions of dollars annually (Strange
and Scott 2005, Buckley 2005). The losses caused by fungi could be either
from reduction in yield or quality of the produce and this entirely depends
on the fungus and crop combination and the nature of this interaction.
In general, the biology, epidemiology and host-pathogen interaction
