Archivio Journal of Plant Pathology

Abstract:

Commercial moth bean (Vigna aconitifolia) cultivars are highly susceptible to bacterial, viral and fungal pathogens. The identification of resistance gene analogs holds great promise for development of resistant cultivars. The major known family of plant resistance genes encodes proteins with nucleotide-binding site (NBS) and C-terminal leucine- rich repeat (LRR) domains. Three degenerate primers designed on identified resistance genes (R-genes) were used in combinations to identify resistance gene analogs in the moth bean cv. FMM-96. These primers amplified products with the expected size of 450-600 bp. When their predicted amino acid sequences were compared to each other and to those of known R-genes, a considerable sequence similarity was found. The identification of conserved domains, such as kinase-1a, kinase-2 and hydrophobic motif confirmed that the sequences belong to the NBS-LRR class gene family.