Jessica Schallon

“Phytochemical Production and Applications to Plant Pathology”
Jessica Schallon, M.S. Student, Department of Plant Pathology, Washington State University

Abstract

Plants have an incredible capacity to manufacture even very complex chemicals. For a long time, plants have served as organic chemistry factories, producing compounds that have been found to be helpful as human medicine (Houghton 2001). More recently, plants have also been harnessed for molecular farming, producing products of interest to people via genetic modification (Tschofen et al. 2016). In the future, genetic modification may in turn be used to help plants produce their own medicines and products of interest to the plant itself (Makeshkumar et al. 2021). While the use of genetic modification can be met with public pushback, many of these techniques have shown great promise in combatting plant diseases (Makeshkumar et al. 2021). Of particularly promising phytochemical products are single-chain variable fragment (scFv) antibodies, or more colloquially, “plantibodies.” These fragments are smaller but functionally analogous to the antibodies of animals, resulting in resistance to a specific pathogen with only minimal modification of the plant genome (Boonrod et al. 2004; Gargouri-Bouzid et al. 2006; Gil et al. 2011; Nickel et al. 2008; Tavladoraki et al. 1993). This unique transgenic approach could be particularly impactful in managing emerging plant diseases and recalcitrant diseases to which cisgenic approaches and cultural practices fail to provide time- and cost-effective control measures.

For more information regarding Jessica’s seminar, please see the seminar announcement.