S. Whitham et al., THE N GENE OF TOBACCO CONFERS RESISTANCE TO TOBACCO MOSAIC-VIRUS IN TRANSGENIC TOMATO, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United Statesof America, 93(16), 1996, pp. 8776-8781
It has been proposed that cloned plane disease resistance genes could
be transferred from resistant to susceptible plant species to control
important crop plant diseases. The recently cloned N gene of tobacco c
onfers resistance to the viral pathogen, tobacco mosaic virus. We gene
rated transgenic tomato plants bearing the N gene and demonstrate that
N confers a hypersensitive response and effectively localizes tobacco
mosaic virus to sites of inoculation in transgenic tomato, as it does
in tobacco. The ability to reconstruct the N-mediated resistance resp
onse to tobacco mosaic virus in tomato demonstrates the utility of usi
ng isolated resistance genes to protect crop plants from diseases, and
it demonstrates that all the components necessary for N-mediated resi
stance are conserved in tomato.