DSSS - The Resistance Awakens: Natural Diversity Informs Engineering of Plant Immune Receptors

The diversity of immune systems across life has driven evolutionary innovations, such as self-mutation in vertebrates and CRISPR-Cas9 in bacteria. In plants, immune receptor diversity is influenced by genomic features, plant life style, domestication, and environmental factors. Advances in genomics allow us to study polymorphism in plant innate immune receptors, revealing structural variations and mutations that enhance ligand binding. In Arabidopsis, high immune receptor diversity correlates with specific genomic features and suggests the possibility of elevated mutation probabilities. In many other plants, subsets of immune receptors also display high diversity at their ligand binding sites, allowing us to predict and design new receptor specificities. Plant immune receptors also have a largely underexplored promoter and transcriptional diversity suggesting rapid adaptation of newly emerging variants. Our work supports the concept of ‘anticipatory immunity’ for plants, where receptors are prone to mutation and selected for diversity. By integrating synthetic biology together with our computational analyses, we demonstrate engineering immune receptors for disease resistance in crops. Additionally, we explore fungal protein evolution and innate immune responses to understand pathogen recognition and genome-level diversity shaping fungal interactions with other organisms.