LONDON (Reuters) - An international team of scientists has managed to transfer disease resistance from one plant family to another, offering broader protection from potentially costly and destructive pests.

A team led by Cyril Zipfel at Britain's Sainsbury Laboratory found that transferring a single gene from a wild plant to disease-susceptible crop plants made them more robust against infections like bacterial wilt and other diseases.

If the results can be duplicated more widely, they could help prevent massive crop losses and avoid environmental, health and financial costs associated with using pesticides, the researchers wrote in the Nature Biotechnology journal on Sunday.

"The implications for engineering crop plants with enhanced resistance to infectious diseases are very promising," Sophien Kamoun, head of the Sainsbury Laboratory, said in a commentary.

The team is already extending its work to several crop plants, including potato, apple, cassava and banana -- all of which suffer from damaging bacterial diseases, particularly in the developing world.

The Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) said last year that bacterial wilt disease had been found in bananas in Ethiopia, Uganda, Rwanda, Kenya, Tanzania and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Uganda, Africa's leading banana grower and consumer, has suffered with the disease since 2001 and it causes losses of between $70 million and $200 million annually, according to CGIAR.

Zipfel's team, which included Dutch, French and American researchers, explained in the study that breeding programs for plant disease resistance usually focus on single genes in crop plants that could fight a particular strain of bug.

This resistance usually breaks down in field-grown crops as the pest finds ways to outwit the plant.

The new study focused on an immune receptor gene called a pattern recognition receptor (PRR) which is activated by many bacterial bugs but is not normally found in potato or tomato plant families.