Japan Tobacco Inc.

Corporate Juridical Person Society for Techno-innovation of Agriculture Forestry and Fisheries

Japan Tabacco Inc.

Yasuhiro Inoue

Yoshimitsu Takakura

Shigeru Kuwata

Yuji Ishida

Fumiki Tsutsumi

The present invention provides transgenic, disease-resistant plants which have been transformed with an expression cassette including a constitutive gene expression promoter; and a gene, under the control of the promoter, encoding a harpin. The transformed cells in the transgenic plant effect the constitutive expression of the harpin in an amount effective for inducing a defense reaction. The harpin is a protein consisting of an amino acid sequence that is at least 90% homologous to the amino acid sequence of SEQ ID NO: 2, and possesses a hypersensitive-response-inducing activity. The present invention also provides methods for producing the transgenic plants, expression cassettes, recombinant vectors and genes encoding harpins.

Disease-resistant plants and method of constructing the same

It is the object of the present invention to provide disease-resistant plants which have been transformed to cause an effective defense reaction, and methods for producing the same. The present invention provides expression cassettes comprising a promoter capable of promoting a constitutive, inducible, or organ- or phase-specific gene expression, and a gene, under the control of said promoter, encoding an elicitor protein.

The object of the present invention is to screen and identify a novel antimicrobial protein which can inhibit the growth of plant pathogenic microorganisms at a relatively low concentration such asandcausative of two major diseases causing damage to rice crops and, further, to clone the gene of this protein. According to the present invention, an antimicrobial protein which can be obtained from a fraction of an aqueous extract ofprecipitated by the ammonium sulfate precipitation method, has an antimicrobial activity at least againstor, and shows the presence of components of about 70 kDa and/or about 65 kDa in molecular weight in the SDS-PAGE method. A gene encoding this protein and a method of using the same are provided.

Growing community of inventors

Ibaraki, Japan

Yasuhiro Inoue