Researchers at the Boyce Thompson Institute (BTI) for Plant Research on Cornell's campus have identified a crucial player in the defense network that allows plants to respond to pathogens.

The findings, published this week in the journal Cell Host and Microbe, open a door for plant breeders to develop plants with better resistance to pathogens.

Under normal circumstances, plants have a large number of resistance proteins, also known as R proteins, to respond to an attack by a pathogen. These proteins initiate such defense responses as releasing defense-signaling hormones and killing off cells surrounding an infection, which then keeps a pathogen from spreading.

However, the researchers identified mutant Arabidopsis plants that did not trigger a normal cell death response to attack by pathogens.

A close look at one of these plants revealed a mutation in a gene for an ATPase, an enzyme that is known to harness energy produced in cells to drive other chemical reactions. The researchers then discovered that this ATPase, called CRT1, interacts with and may mediate defense responses initiated by three different R proteins.

"Because very few proteins that physically interact with resistance proteins have been identified to date, the identification and characterization of CRT1 should provide new insights in plant disease resistance and opportunities to enhance this resistance," said Hong-Gu Kang, a research associate at BTI and the paper's lead author. Dan Klessig, a scientist at BTI and adjunct professor in Cornell's Department of Plant Pathology and Plant-Microbe Biology, is the paper's senior author.

The study was funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the National Science Foundation.