ABSTRACT
After centuries of improving crop plants by breeding for desirable traits, agricultural scientists are now using the tools of molecular biology and genetic engineering to develop transgenic plants with the desired genes. This chapter deals with fungal pathogens of crop plants. It discusses strategies that have been used to produce fungus resistant transgenic plants and also describes some of the emerging possibilities in the wake of large scale genome sequencing aspects being undertaken in crop plants. Fungal diseases are rated either the most important or second most important factor contributing to yield losses in our major cereal, pulse and oilseed crops. One of the effective strategies for broad spectrum plant disease resistance has been to exploit systemic acquired resistance (SAR) pathway. Several plant mutants have been obtained that constitutively induce SAR. Such lesion-mimic mutations have been effective in designing resistance to powdery mildew in barley.
