Natural GMOs Part 300. Fungal gene rescues wheat from Fusarium Head Blight disease. This will make wheat an all natural GMO.

Horizontal gene transfer of Fhb7 resistance gene from fungus underlies Fusarium head blight resistance in wheat.

This post makes it a fitting triple century of Natural GMOs at this blog. Will the Pundit bat on with this series? Yes.

Wheat production is threatened by the devastating fungal disease Fusasium head blight (FHB). The pathogens, Fusasium species, produce food toxins known as trichothecenes that cause immunotoxicity and cytotoxicity in human and animals, and contaminate cereal grains. So far, only a limited number of strains in the global wheat germplasm habour FHB-resistant genetic resources, among which is a quantitative trait locus, Fhb7, introduced from a wheat wild relative, either Thinopyrum elongatum or Thinopyrum ponticum. 
Hongwei Wang, from Shandong Agricultural University of China, and colleagues reported a glutathione S-transferase (GST) as the candidate gene for the Fhb7 locus and revealed the functional and evolutionary mechanisms of this FHB resistance gene...

Surprisingly, Fhb7’s homologues were not detected in the entire plant kingdom but were found in the genome of Epichloë species, a genus of endophytic fungi, suggesting that Fhb7 might have been acquired by horizontal gene transfer.

 At Nature Plants
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41477-020-0673-8.epdf

Citing
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2020/04/08/science.aba5435


Horizontal gene transfer of Fhb7 from fungus underlies Fusarium head blight resistance in wheat
Hongwei Wang et al
Science 09 Apr 2020:
eaba5435 DOI: 10.1126/science.aba5435
Abstract
Fusarium head blight (FHB), a fungal disease caused by Fusarium species that produce food toxins, currently devastates wheat production worldwide, yet few resistance resources have been discovered in wheat germplasm. Here, we cloned the FHB resistance gene Fhb7 based on assembling the genome of Thinopyrum elongatum, a species used in wheat distant hybridization breeding. Fhb7 encodes a glutathione S-transferase (GST) and confers broad resistance to Fusarium species by detoxifying trichothecenes via de-epoxidation. Fhb7 GST homologs are absent in plants, and our evidence supports Th. elongatum has gained Fhb7 via horizontal gene transfer (HGT) from an endophytic Epichloë species. Fhb7 introgressions in wheat confers resistance to both FHB and crown rot in diverse wheat backgrounds without yield penalty, providing a solution for Fusarium resistance breeding.