AI-empowered crop protection against insect-borne diseases

Insect-borne plant diseases, such as psyllid-transmitted citrus Huanglongbing (HLB) and whitefly-transmitted viral diseases, pose a major threat to global agriculture. These insect-borne pathogens establish in multipartite interactions with host plants and insect vectors, frequently altering host physiology and vector behavior to facilitate transmission. This review examines recent advances in plant defense against these pathogens, as well as pathogen strategies that undermine host defenses. We emphasize the promise of artificial intelligence (AI) in accelerating scientific research and technological advancements for managing insect-borne diseases. These strategies contribute to building an integrated platform, which trains scientific foundation models and creates AI agents to automate research workflows and test hypotheses. They also provided precision intervention strategies by identifying resistance genes, developing in silico approaches to develop new pesticides, and synthetic immune proteins. These AI platforms for insect-borne plant diseases enable a systemic understanding of the complex pathogen-plant-insect interactions, thereby offering new opportunities for controlling disease outbreaks and epidemics.