The use of conventional breeding techniques to move the newfound blight-resistance gene into the few dominant commercial varieties popular in the United States is all but impossible, according to Jiang.

"We can do it by conventional breeding, but we can't move it into the standard cultivated varieties without losing them," he says. "It is almost impossible to create another Burbank variety, for example, through conventional breeding. Your odds of getting the one gene in would be like winning the lottery."

Still, the Wisconsin group, plans to develop engineered varieties for the garden. The hope, they say, is to develop the technology that will gradually win consumer acceptance and, perhaps someday, go where no GMO has gone before.

The lead authors of the PNAS paper published today are Junqi Song of the UW-Madison department of horticulture and James M. Bradeen of the UW-Madison department of plant pathology and the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Agricultural Research Service. Other co-authors include S. Kristine Naess and Geraldine T. Haberlach of the UW-Madison department of plant pathology and the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Agricultural Research Service, John A. Raasch and Sandra Austin-Phillips of the UW-Madison Biotechnology Center, Susan M. Wielgus of the UW-Madison department of horticulture, Jia Liu and C. Robin Buell of the Institute for Genomic Research in Rockville, Md., and Hanhui Kuang of the department of vegetable crops at the University of California at Davis.

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Contact: Jiming Jiang
jjiang1@wisc.edu
608-262-1878
University of Wisconsin-Madison
14-Jul-2003