Xianqun Huang¹ , Minhua Jiang¹ , Jian Chen^2,3 , Zhenyu Zhu¹ , Li Li¹ , Yingping Dong¹ , Zhongping Lin²

1. Guizhou Key Laboratory of Agricultural Biotechnology, Guizhou Institute of Biotechnology, Guiyang, 550006, P.R. China
2. College of Life Science, Peking University, Beijing, 100816, P.R. China
3. Institute of Biotechnology, Fujian Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Fuzhou, 350003, P.R. China
Author    Correspondence author
Molecular Plant Breeding, 2011, Vol. 2, No. 5   doi: 10.5376/mpb.2011.02.0005
Received: 13 Dec., 2010    Accepted: 12 Jan., 2011    Published: 01 Mar., 2011

This is an open access article published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Phytopthora infestans, also known as potato late blight, is a serious and widespread disease of potato that causes significant yield losses in potato production every year. Controlling this destructive disease has become a great challenge for potato farmers. In order to minimize commercial losses and improve tuber quality, it is a smart way to build potato disease resistant capacity by the path of transgenic genetic improvement. In this present study, a gene encoding the hypersensitive response-assisting protein (hrap) originally isolated from sweet pepper induced with the harpin_Pss-mediated hypersensitive response (HR) was introduced to the potato variety Burbank mediated by Agrobacterium tumefaciens. The rate of transgenic acquisitions was 61.15% positive detected by PCR, whereas 53.85% of the PCR positive plants were validated by southern blot assay. RT-PCR analysis showed that the hrap gene was integrated into the potato genome and expressed in the transgenic potatoes. The sequence of the hrap gene isolated from transgenic potato was 99.3% similarity identified with that of the hrap genes deposited in GenBan (GenBank: AF168415). The resistant assay was performed by artificially incubating the pathogens of P. infestans. The results showed that the transgenic potatoes exhibit the resistant enhancement.

Potato; Hrap gene; Phytopthora infestans Agrobacterium mediated transformation