A young Federican researcher in agricultural genetics receives the 2017 UNASA Award

Young researcher Giuseppe Andolfo, from the Department of Agriculture at the University of Naples Federico II, was awarded the UNASA Prize for the best scientific paper of the year 2017 by the National Union of Academies for Applied Sciences for Agricultural Development, Food Safety and Environmental Protection (UNASA) at the prestigious Banca Marche Auditorium of the University of Macerata.

Dr. Giuseppe Andolfo together with Dr. Paolo Iovieno emerged as the national winner in the section entitled"Plant Biotechnology"for the nomination of the paper"Genome-Editing Technologies for Enhancing Plant Disease Resistance" (doi: 10.3389/fpls.2016.01813) published in 2016 in the prestigious journal"Frontiers in Plant Science" .

Today, one of the biggest challenges for agriculture is to obtain disease-resistant plants to reduce the use of chemicals. "Genome editing" is a very powerful tool to modify and modulate the Immunity System of plants. This article discusses the potential of this technique to enhance the action of existing resistance genes and strategies to modify pathogen recognition sites. Thus, the proposed reinforced plant defense system allows for increased performance of crop plants in a sustainable manner. The work conducted was coordinated by Professor Luigi Frusciante and Professor Maria Raffaella Ercolano.