The Plant-Pathogen Arms Race: Nature Communications Study Reveals Key Player in Plant Immunity
The co-evolutionary arms race between plants and pathogens is one of biological balance. Plants want to defend themselves from invaders, while pathogens want to infect their hosts without killing them to propagate. Plant biologists are keen to understand the molecular battles occurring in infected plant cell territory.
“Our main thrust is to understand how plant immune receptors and their associated proteins react when a pathogen invades plant cells,” said Professor Savithramma Dinesh-Kumar, Department of Plant Biology and The Genome Center. “The first set of plant nucleotide-binding leucine-rich repeat (NLR) class of immune receptors were cloned almost 25 years ago, but we still don’t understand how these receptors are functioning.”
In a study appearing in Nature Communications, Dinesh-Kumar and his colleagues from Iowa State University, China Agricultural University, Stanford University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology identified the function of a key protein that regulates plant immunity. The fundamental research could eventually lead to agricultural practices capable of endowing crops with broad-spectrum resistance against pathogens.