Complementary peptides represent a credible alternative to agrochemicals by activating translation of targeted proteins

The current agriculture main challenge is to maintain food production while facing multiple threats such as increasing world population, temperature increase, lack of agrochemicals due to health issues and uprising of weeds resistant to herbicides. Developing novel, alternative, and safe methods is hence of paramount importance. Here, we show that complementary peptides (CPEPs) from any gene can be designed to target specifically plant coding genes. External application of synthetic peptides increases the abundance of the targeted protein, leading to related phenotypes. Moreover, we provide evidence that CPEPs can be powerful tools in agronomy to improve plant traits, such as growth, resistance to pathogen or heat stress, without the needs of genetic approaches. Finally, by combining their activity they can also be used to reduce weed growth. Chemicals are extensively used in modern agriculture. Together with agricultural mechanization, genetics, and crop management, chemicals have been primarily responsible for the huge improvement in crop yields since 1945 (http://www.kingcorn.org/news/timeless/YieldTrends.html). Chemicals fight against weeds or pathogens or act as growth regulators, such as hormones and fertilizers. World agriculture is facing huge challenges in the coming years to feed the increasing world population: the increasing temperature will decrease crop yields, and the lack of mineral phosphorus-based fertilizers, which are limited resources extracted from soils, will be detrimental to worldwide agriculture. In addition, the use of chemicals in today's agriculture faces two major problems: first, more and more weeds/pathogens are becoming resistant to currently used pesticides. The second issue is social acceptance and growing public concern about molecules polluting soils and/or are dangerous for animal and human health. In this context, identifying safe and natural molecules increasing crop yields is one of the biggest challenges that plant biologists have to face. We present here the identification of peptides capable of modulating the expression of protein-coding genes, simply by their external application. Furthermore, we show that these peptides can be used in agronomy to improve crop development while decreasing weed growth, and that certain phenotypes that are difficult to manage with chemicals, such as heat resistance and chlorophyll content, can be modulated by these peptides.

Mélanie Ormancey, Bruno Guillotin, Rémy Merret, Laurent Camborde, Carine Duboé, Bertrand Fabre, Cécile Pouzet, Francis Impens, Delphi Van Haver, Marie-Christine Carpentier, Hélène San Clemente, Marielle Aguilar, Dominique Lauressergues, Lars B. Scharff, Carole Pichereaux, Odile Burlet-Schiltz, Cécile Bousquet-Antonelli, Kris Gevaert, Patrice Thuleau, Serge Plaza, Jean-Philippe Combier