Engineering plant immune circuit: walking to the bright future with a novel toolbox

Abstract

Plant pathogens destroy crops and cause severe yield losses, leading to an insufficient food supply to sustain the human population. Apart from relying on natural plant immune systems to combat biological agents or waiting for the appropriate evolutionary steps to occur over time, researchers are currently seeking new breakthrough methods to boost disease resistance in plants through genetic engineering. Here, we summarize the past two decades of research in disease resistance engineering against an assortment of pathogens through modifying the plant immune components (internal and external) with several biotechnological techniques. We also discuss potential strategies and provide perspectives on engineering plant immune systems for enhanced pathogen resistance and plant fitness.

Machine learning general transcriptional predictors of plant disease

“…Additionally, such genetic resistance has proven relatively short lived when deployed at scale [54], although considerable effort is being put into stacking immune receptors to increase efficacy in the field [55][56][57]. As plant sciences and crop improvement move to engineered systems approaches [58][59][60], greater understanding and predictive power for processes such as plant immunity, abiotic stress tolerance, growth, and nutrient utilization are needed. Systems approaches leveraging increasingly common big data sets, analyzed by interdisciplinary teams, can help provide the knowledge and framework to achieve these goals.…”

An ancient cis‐element targeted by Ralstonia solanacearum TALE‐like effectors facilitates the development of a promoter trap that could confer broad‐spectrum wilt resistance

“…An important aspect in the development of transgene‐based, pathogen‐resistant crops is that the respective transgene should have no adverse effect on plant performance. Typically, however, resistance‐conferring transgenic systems are based on one or more constitutively expressed components, such as an effector‐specific receptor protein (Vuong et al ., 2022 ). This not only places an energetic burden on the plant but also carries the risk that constitutive expression will become the target of host gene silencing, ultimately resulting in a lack of receptor expression and a dysfunctional perception system (Rajeevkumar et al ., 2015 ).…”

Plant lectins: Handymen at the cell surface

“…However, the underlying mechanisms of post-elicitor recognition are far from being understood. One way to expand the research field of LecRLKs could be to apply novel genome editing and silencing technologies, thereby modifying the carbohydrate-binding properties of LecRLKs and other PRRs in planta ( Vuong, 2022 ). This could yield increased knowledge about biotic interactions and potential agronomic applications.…”