Researchers from the Spanish Research Council (CSIC) at the Centre for Research in Agricultural Genomics (CRAG) and the Institute for Plant Molecular & Cellular Biology (IBMCP), in collaboration with Spain's Instituto de Agroquímica y Tecnología de Alimentos (IATA), have developed a biotechnological tool to produce, in a very efficient manner, antifungal proteins in plants.

The results of this research, which could affect the agriculture and pharmaceutical sectors, have been published in the Plant Biotechnology Journal.

Disease-causing fungi that infect plants, animals and people pose a serious threat to human and animal health, food security and ecosystem resilience, the researchers said.

Fungi are a challenge to food security because they destroy major crops globally and contaminate food and feed with mycotoxins that are detrimental to animal and human health, CRAG said in its announcement.

Maria Coca, a researcher at CRAG and one of the senior authors of the study, explained that "only a few classes of antifungal agents are available today, and even these are not fully effective due to the development of resistance, host toxicity and undesirable side effects. Many of these compounds do not even comply with the regulations, and therefore, they cannot be used. Thus, there is an urgent need to develop novel antifungals whose properties and mechanisms of action represent improvements on the existing ones and which can be applied in diverse fields, including crop and postharvest protection, preservation in cosmetics, materials and food and animal and human health."

Coca's research group, in collaboration with IATA researcher Jose F. Marcos, aims to develop new antifungal compounds based on the antifungal proteins secreted by filamentous fungi.

The problem is that the synthesis of these compounds is extremely complex; hence, their exploitation requires efficient, sustainable and safe production systems, CRAG said.

José Antonio Daros, a CSIC researcher at IBMCP, is an expert in viruses that infect plants. Through genetic engineering, Daros and his team in Valencia, Spain, managed to modify the tobacco mosaic virus so that, instead of producing its own pathogenic proteins, it produced other proteins of interest.

In Barcelona, Spain, Coca's team implemented this tool to produce antifungal proteins in leaves of the Nicotiana benthamiana plant, a member of the tobacco family widely used in research, and discovered that the leaves produced large quantities of these new antifungals.

In addition, the researchers demonstrated that extracts recovered from the N. benthamiana plants are active against pathogenic fungi, with the ability to protect the tomato plant from infection by the fungus Botrytis cinerea, better known as grey mold.

The research shows that the plants can be used as biofactories of antifungal proteins for commercial purposes, CRAG said.