Modern bioengineering approaches to creating resistance to the Plum pox virus in stone fruit crops

Abstract

In recent years, Plum pox virus (PPV) has become a major threat to the cultivation of stone fruit plants. This virus has caused enormous economic damage and caused a significant decrease in production areas in eastern Europe and the Mediterranean. Plum pox virus has spread around the world and is classified by plant quarantine services as the most dangerous pathogen for apricots, plums and peaches Unfortunately, at present, science cannot offer any ways to treat viral plant diseases, and the destruction of infected trees remains the only way to contain the spread of viruses. Given the seriousness of the disease, the difficulty of controlling its spread, the lack of disease-resistant existing varieties, the need to create commercial varieties with increased resistance to this pathogen is obvious. Modern methods of genetic engineering make it possible to significantly accelerate the processes of creating highly productive plum varieties with increased or complete resistance to viruses, unattainable by traditional breeding methods. However, most of the work on the modification of the genomes of stone fruit crops was carried out using juvenile material of zygotic origin, which has a higher morphogenetic potential compared to varieties. The use of modern bioengineering techniques in the selection of stone fruit plants is hampered by the lack of reliable techniques that can provide a sufficiently high frequency of regeneration of shoots from somatic tissues. These and other reasons call for the development of an effective genotype-independent system for regenerating and modifying the genomes of commercial plum varieties. Given the rapid development of plant genome editing techniques, targeted mutation of host genes involved in replication and widespread PPV in infected tissues may be a promising approach for engineering resistance to viruses that exclude the introduction of foreign sequences into the plum genome.