Bacterial invasion of crop plants is a major cause of economic damage. Plant breeders have for a long time attempted to develop cultivars that are resistant to phytopathogenic bacteria. The objective of this proposal is to apply modern genetic engineering to achieve the same aim. Specifically, the approach is to express a lysozyme of high specific activity in a plant and thus render it resistant to bacterial infection. The gene of hen egg-white lysozyme is selected for manipulation. An intronless version of this gene has been shown to be expressible in yeast. In Phase I the concentration of hen egg-white lysozyme required to lyse several species of phytopathogenic bacteria under physiological conditions will be determined. If the results indicate that hen egg-white lysozyme is effective at a concentration that is expected to be achievable through transformation and expression in a plant, then Phase II support will be requested to insert the lysozyme gene into the genome of tobacco and the transformants tested for resistance to a series of a bacterial pathogens.
