Objective:
Apply newly developed plant defense technologies to the protection of wheat from scab caused by Fusarium species. Technologies include, methods for selection of peptides that bind to and disrupt the development of infective structures of invasive pathogens, and means of delivering disruptive defense peptides in transgenic plants via fusion to a scaffold protein.

Approach:
Select peptides that bind to pathogen structure from combinational libraries of on billion or more random peptide sequences. Evaluate the ablility of recovered binding peptides to inhibit germination and growth of F. graminearum macroconidia and germlings representative of diverse isolates.