China builds world’s first custom plant immunity system for epidemic response

Chinese scientists have created an AI-guided platform to engineer custom plant immune receptors to rapidly combat emerging diseases that threaten plants, including commercial crops vulnerable to devastating outbreaks.

Their programmable synthetic immune receptors can be introduced into plants to help them detect proteins made by specific bacteria, viruses and fungi, triggering an immune response to neutralise the threat, according to the team.

By leveraging protein design guided by artificial intelligence (AI), custom receptors could be engineered within weeks rather than years, fast-tracking the breeding of disease-resistant crops and enabling a quicker response to emerging plant diseases, the researchers said.

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“This work establishes a versatile platform for efficient plant immunity engineering,” the team from the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology and biotechnology company Qi Biodesign said in a paper published in the peer-reviewed journal Science last month.

Around the world, essential crops are threatened by plant pathogens that can devastate agricultural yields and compromise global food security.

Plant breeding programmes often introduce resistance genes that encode receptors capable of recognising proteins secreted by pathogens. When these receptors bind to their protein target, it can trigger an immune response.

“However, this resistance is often rapidly overcome by fast-evolving pathogens, particularly in modern agricultural systems characterised by large-scale monoculture of genetically uniform crops,” the team said.

This biological vulnerability is what heightens the threat of agro-terrorism and plant bioweapons, or pathogens purposefully introduced or modified to target specific crops.