Compositions and methods for generating maize plants that exhibit resistance to northern leaf blight are provided herein. Isolated polynucleotides encoding a polypeptide that confers resistance to northern leaf blight, polynucleotide constructs comprising such, and maize plants comprising the polynucleotide constructs are provided. The methods include expressing an isolated polynucleotide in a maize cell via standard transformation methods and obtaining a maize plant from said maize cell.

The present invention relates to a composition comprising at least one polypeptide, which polypeptide comprises the amino acid sequence set out in any one of SEQ ID NOs: 1 to 51 or 101 to 111 or an amino acid sequence having at least about 80% sequence identify thereto and which polypeptide is capable of binding to a fungus. The invention further relates to a composition comprising at least one polypeptide, which polypeptide comprises a CDR1 region having the amino acid sequence set out in any one of SEQ ID NOs: 52 to 67 or 112 to 122, a CDR2 region having the amino acid sequence set out in any one of SEQ ID NOs: 68 to 83 or 123 to 133, and a CDR3 region having the amino acid sequence set out in any one of SEQ ID NOs: 84 to 100 or 134 to 144 and which polypeptide is capable of binding to a fungus. The compositions may be used as anti-fungal compositions.

Embodiments of the present disclosure pertain to methods of modulating a stress response in a eukaryotic organism against an environmental stress by introducing an RNA fragment (RF) or an antisense nucleotide to the eukaryotic organism. Thereafter, the RF or antisense nucleotide modulates the stress response against the environmental stress. Additional embodiments of the present disclosure pertain to the RFs and antisense nucleotides of the present disclosure. The RFs generally include: a sequence recognition site that contains a reverse complement sequence of a nucleotide sequence of the organism; and a stem loop structure with a paired region that includes paired RNA nucleotides, and an unpaired region that includes unpaired RNA nucleotides in the form of a loop. The antisense nucleotides may include a reverse complement sequence of the RFs.

The invention discloses a soybean plant, or a part of said plant comprising the transgenic event CIGBDt-Def1 or the transgenic event CIGBIs-Def5, as well as a method for the detection of those events in soybean samples. It also provides a seed from a soybean plant comprising said transgenic events, and products obtained from a plant, or from soybean seeds, comprising one of said events. In addition, the invention is related to a method for the production of soybean plants resistant to glyphosate, and to diseases caused by fungi or oomycetes, comprising the introduction of one of the mentioned transgenic events in the genome of said plants. The increase in the yield of a soybean crop in the field can be achieved with the transgenic events of the invention.

The invention relates to methods and compositions for identifying and selecting maize plants with enhanced resistance to northern leaf blight. Maize plants generated by the methods of the invention are also a feature of the invention.

The present invention relates to new transporter polypeptides, and genes encoding therefor, which can be used to confer upon a plant resistance to one or more biotrophic fungal pathogens.

The present invention relates to the use of Argonaute systems in plants for genome engineering, and compositions used in such methods.

A system for reducing the incidence or severity of fungal infection of a plant, comprising a chemical fungicide component, which may be provided by foliar or root (soil or liquid nutrient) application, together with an antifungal plant defensin not in nature expressed in the plant being protected or expressed in lower amounts or in different tissues, provides synergistic improvement in protection against infection by a plant pathogenic fungus which is susceptible to the defensin and the fungicide. The fungicide can be a strobilurin or a triazole, and the defensin can be selected from a wide range of known defensins, for example, NaD1 and others, or it can be a chimeric defensin engineered for low toxicity to the plant. The defensin can be provided as a protein formulation, optionally together with the fungicide, or it can be provided by recombinant expression in the plant to be protected from fungal infection.

The present invention relates to a mutant onion (Allium cepa) plant, which is resistant to a pathogen of viral, bacterial, fungal or oomycete origin. The mutant onion plant has a reduced level, reduced activity or complete absence of AcDMR6 protein as compared to a wild type onion plant.

The present invention belongs to the field of plant genetic engineering. In particular, the present invention relates to a method for obtaining wheat with increased resistance to powdery mildew, wherein the wheat has comparable or even increased yield comparable to wild type.