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…
Chinese scientists have developed an AI-powered platform to engineer custom plant immune receptors, allowing for the rapid creation of plant immune systems to combat emerging diseases. The programmable synthetic immune receptors can be introduced into crops to detect proteins from specific bacteria, viruses, and fungi, triggering an immune response that neutralizes the threat.
This approach could significantly speed up the development of disease-resistant crops, with the synthetic receptors designed within weeks instead of years. The team from the Chinese Academy of Sciences and biotechnology company Qi Biodesign published their findings in the journal Science. The AI-guided system enables the rapid recognition of new and emerging pathogen proteins, offering a versatile platform for plant immunity engineering.
While some of the receptors showed limited immune activity, the overall success rate was promising, demonstrating the broad applicability of the synthetic receptor strategy.
Written by urgent.news from South China Morning Post's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
