KU Leuven and Resurrect Bio join forces to engineer durable resistance to disease in banana and cassava
New partnership combines AI-driven protein design with high-throughput plant screening to restore the ability of crop immune receptors to recognise major pathogens
Banana and cassava are essential to food security and rural livelihoods across Africa and the Global South, and provide income for millions of smallholder farmers. They are also important commercial crops. Both crops can tolerate challenging growing conditions, but diseases remain a major threat to their production, often with limited options for effective and sustainable control. A new research partnership between the KU Leuven Tropical Crop Improvement Laboratory, the Experimental Plant Systems Biology Lab and Resurrect Bio aims to tackle some of the most devastating diseases affecting these tropical crops.
The collaboration combines expertise in plant genetics, genetic engineering, genetic technologies, sequencing, protein interactions and plant-pathogen interactions with Resurrect Bio’s FloraFold® AI platform and high-throughput in-planta screening technology. It also draws on the high-throughput screening technologies for banana and cassava available at KU Leuven.
Together, the partners aim to identify plant immune receptors and design precise genetic changes that restore their ability to recognise pathogens. The goal is to accelerate the discovery and engineering of immune receptors capable of providing durable resistance against major pathogens. Initial research will target several major diseases. In banana, these include Fusarium wilt (including Tropical Race 4), Xanthomonas wilt, black Sigatoka and banana bunchy top virus. In cassava, the research will focus on cassava mosaic disease and cassava brown streak disease.
“Banana and cassava are essential to food security and rural livelihoods across Africa and the Global South,” says Prof. Hervé Vanderschuren. “Their improvement allows the design of agrosystems that are more durable. Partnerships between academic research and innovative biotechnology companies are essential to translate scientific discoveries into solutions with real-world impact. We’re looking forward to working with the team at Resurrect Bio to develop new solutions for the crops that are so important to farmers and communities around the world." The partners see the collaboration as an opportunity to bring cutting-edge technologies closer to crops that are critically important for millions of smallholder farmers and for the global sustainability of commercial crops.
About the partners
- The Tropical Crop Improvement Laboratory at KU Leuven, headed by Prof. Hervé Vanderschuren, focuses its research on breeding tropical crops, integrating conventional breeding, molecular breeding, and functional genomics and phenotyping.
- The Experimental Plant Systems Biology Lab, headed by Prof. Devang Mehta at KU Leuven, studies biomolecular interactions using advanced proteomics: the study of the structure and function of proteins, including the way they work and interact with each other inside cells.
- Resurrect Bio is a plant biotech start-up that uses gene editing to make crops resistant to disease by fixing their immune systems. The company focuses on giving the world’s farmers a better way to protect their plants, using the crop’s own immune system instead of spraying chemicals.
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