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

Chinese scientists have developed an AI-guided platform to engineer custom plant immune receptors, aiming to rapidly combat emerging diseases that threaten crops, including commercially valuable ones. The synthetic immune receptors can be introduced into plants to detect proteins made by specific bacteria, viruses, and fungi, triggering an immune response to neutralize the threat.

This AI-driven platform could engineer custom receptors within weeks, significantly faster than traditional methods that may take years. The researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences and biotech company Qi Biodesign published their findings in the journal Science. The new technology could help breed disease-resistant crops more quickly, addressing the threat of plant pathogens that can devastate agricultural yields and compromise food security.

By engineering synthetic receptors, the team aimed to overcome the limited diversity of natural plant immune receptors, which makes the development process difficult and time-consuming. The synthetic receptors successfully recognized proteins from diverse plant pathogens, including viruses, bacteria, fungi, and oomycetes. However, some receptors showed no immune activity, possibly due to improper protein expression, binders failing to engage with target pathogen proteins, or the inability to trigger the necessary conformational changes for immune activation.

The researchers also developed a strategy to stack synthetic receptors, creating a scalable and multiplexed framework for engineering broad-spectrum and durable disease resistance in crops. While designing synthetic receptors for certain pathogens remains challenging, the overall success rate demonstrates the broad applicability of this synthetic receptor strategy for recognizing diverse pathogen-derived proteins.