A necessary considering factor for breeding: growth-defense tradeoff in plants

Abstract

Crop diseases cause enormous yield losses and threaten global food security. Deployment of resistant cultivars can effectively control the disease and to minimize crop losses. However, high level of genetic immunity to disease was often accompanied by an undesired reduction in crop growth and yield. Recently, literatures have been rapidly emerged in understanding the mechanism of disease resistance and development genes in crop plants. To determine how and why the costs and the likely benefit of resistance genes caused in crop varieties, we re-summarized the present knowledge about the crosstalk between plant development and disease resistance caused by those genes that function as plasma membrane residents, MAPK cassette, nuclear envelope (NE) channels components and pleiotropic regulators. Considering the growth-defense tradeoffs on the basis of current advances, finally, we try to understand and suggest that a reasonable balancing strategies based on the interplay between immunity with growth should be considered to enhance immunity capacity without yield penalty in future crop breeding.

Sweet Cherry Plants Prioritize Their Response to Cope with Summer Drought, Overshadowing the Defense Response to Pseudomonas syringae pv. syringae

“…These findings confirm that the initial state of slower leaf growth (Figure 2) in this group of plants persisted until 90 dpi, resulting in a lower leaf growth rate. Such phenomena have been previously documented in plants that have a sustained heightened defense state, resulting in growth trade-offs in the absence of the pathogen [28,[56][57][58].…”

“…However, further studies are needed to explore nutrient metabolism and its effects on the growth/defense trade-off. Moreover, disease-resistant plants may incur yield penalties in the absence of the pathogen when compared to susceptible varieties [56,57]. Currently, there are ongoing efforts to mitigate these penalties through the application of new gene editing techniques [67][68][69].…”

CRISPR‐targeted mutagenesis of mitogen‐activated protein kinase phosphatase 1 improves both immunity and yield in wheat

“…In general, these studies demonstrated that MAPK kinases play important roles between plant immunity and yield. Understanding the regulatory mechanism of MAPKs will undoubtedly benefit the development of future crop varieties by providing durable resistance against pathogens and other agronomic traits (Zhang et al ., 2023 ).…”

Cross-family transfer of the Arabidopsis cell-surface immune receptor LORE to tomato confers sensing of 3-hydroxylated fatty acids and enhanced disease resistance

“…Overexpression or constitutive activation of immunity components is often associated with fitness costs, as plants need to fine-tune the division of their limited resources between immunity and growth (Karasov et al, 2017;Wang et al, 2021;Zhang et al, 2023). Such observations were, for example, made for overexpression of the immune regulator NON EXPRESSOR OF PR1 (NPR1) in rice, which increases disease resistance but also causes growth retardation and spontaneous cell death (Chern et al, 2005).…”