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Sweet potatoes (Ipomoea batatasL.
) are an important cash crop in the world, and China is the world's largest producer, consumer and exporter of sweet potatoes, accounting for more than
60% of the world's total production.
As a characteristic agricultural product in China, sweet potatoes are not only the bottom-line crop to ensure food security, but also the advantageous crop
for targeted poverty alleviation.
Sweet potato planting areas are mainly distributed in temperate, tropical and subtropical regions, and frequent pests have become the main factors
restricting sweet potato production.
Sweet potato baby weevils are the most harmful pests in sweet potato cultivation, and are also internationally important quarantine pests, which cause harm during planting and storage of potato cubes by biting leaf vines and eating potato nuggets and seriously affecting the yield and edible quality
of sweet potatoes.
Sweet potato weevils occur very seriously in Asian and African potato areas, which can cause 10%~30% yield loss, and more than 50% in severe cases, and improper prevention can easily lead to harvest failure, bringing huge economic losses
to sweet potato production.
In the sweet potato planting area in southern China, it can occur for many generations a year and overlap generations, and due to climate warming, it has spread to the planting area of the Yangtze River Basin in recent years, and there is a trend
of expansion year by year.
However, at present, there is no effective resistance resource for sweet potato weevil, and chemical control such as large-scale application of pesticides is mainly adopted, which not only increases production costs, but also leads to environmental pollution and food safety
.
Therefore, exploring the insect-resistant genetic resources of sweet potatoes, carrying out research on the molecular mechanism of resistance, and promoting the development of insect-resistant technologies and the selection and breeding of resistant varieties are the most economical, environmentally friendly and sustainable development directions for solving sweet potato weevil pests, and are also the urgent needs
of the current development of sweet potato industry.
In recent years, researcher Hou Xingliang of South China Botanical Garden of the Chinese Academy of Sciences has led the research team of plant development and quality regulation to focus on the genetic basis and efficient precision breeding technology of sweet potato
.
Due to the very weak research foundation of sweet potato weevil resistance, the diversity of sweet potato insect resistance resources is not high, resulting in slow progress in the research of insect resistance mechanism, known as
"potato road difficulty".
Faced with this problem, Hou Xingliang's team cooperated with researchers at Guangdong Ocean University to spend many years collecting different sweet potato materials in southern China where pests are highly endemic and conducting insect resistance evaluations
.
After three years of field screening, two precious sweet potato baby weevils with high resistance germplasm
were obtained.
After that, they used the anti-sensitivity germplasm to construct the F1 genetic population, and at the same time, overcame the difficulties of difficult detection and instability of the insect-resistant phenotype under the control conditions, established a stable controllable evaluation system for sweet potato weevil's resistance, and finally successfully located and cloned two key genes of sweet potato weevil resistance, SPWR1 ( Sweet Potato Weevil Resistance 1) and SPWR2
.
It is worth noting that the researchers also overcame the problems of difficult operation, low conversion rate and long cycle of sweet potato genetic transformation, and developed an efficient and stable new type of sweet potato genetic transformation method by using the rapid proliferation ability of sweet potato itself and the targeted injection method
of Agrobacterium tumefaciens (non-rhizophoris pseudogenitus).
Subsequently, a large amount of sweet potato genetic material proved that SPWR1 and SPWR2 both positively regulated the resistance of sweet potato baby weevils.
A variety of physiological and biochemical experiments have shown that the invasion of sweet potato baby weevil can induce SPWR1-encoded WRKY transcription factor specific binding to the promoter of resistance allele SPWR2 W-box elements, thereby activating gene expression in the latter; The protein encoded by SPWR2 is a key enzyme in the synthetic pathway of sweet potato quinic acid, which further initiates the biosynthesis of downstream quinic acid derivatives to resist the invasion
of sweet potato baby weevils.
Further physicochemical experiments in insects also proved that the derived compounds carrying the 1-hydroxy-quinic acid group showed inhibitory activity
on the intestinal digestive enzymes and activities of sweet potato weevil.
At present, there is no cultivation of sweet potato resistance varieties in agriculture, and the germplasm created by this study significantly improves the resistance without reducing the original yield and quality of the variety, filling the gap
in the development and utilization of sweet potato baby weevil-resistant germplasm in the world.
It is worth mentioning that quinic acid and its derivatives do not have pharmacological toxicity to the human body at the endogenous concentration of sweet potato, and are not easy to remain in the natural environment, and natural insect-resistant variant varieties containing high levels of quinic acid have strong insect resistance, demonstrating a potential, environmentally friendly and resource-saving agricultural insect-resistant program
。 In short, this study not only clones the natural resistance genes of sweet potato natural enemies pests for the first time, but also reveals the regulatory mechanism of natural insect resistance substances downstream, which provides a new direction and new ideas for field control methods of sweet potato baby weevils, which is of great significance
for promoting the molecular breeding of sweet potatoes with high yield, high quality and multi-resistance, promoting the research and development of key technologies and the transformation of achievements of characteristic high-value ecological agriculture, driving the benign development of sweet potato industry and increasing farmers' production and income.
The results were recently published as cover stories in
the international authoritative botanical journal Nature Plants.
Associate Professor Liu Xu of South China Botanical Garden of Chinese Academy of Sciences is the first author of the paper, Master Wang Yaru, Master Mei Guoguo Master and Dr.
Liao Yinyin and Associate Professor Zhu Hongbo of Guangdong Ocean University are co-first authors of the paper, and Professor Hou Xingliang of South China Botanical Garden is the corresponding author
of the paper.
The research has been supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China-Guangdong Provincial Joint Fund and the Guangdong Special Support Program for Young Top Talents.
Link: www.
nature.
com/articles/s41477-022-01272-1
