Plug-and-fight: engineering plant immunity by domain swapping
Yachun Su1, Tingting Sun2, Chuihuai You1
1Key Laboratory of Sugarcane Biology and Genetic Breeding, Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs, National Engineering Research Center for Sugarcane, College of Agriculture, Fujian Agriculture and Forestry University, Fuzhou, 350002, China.
Abstract:
Potato late blight severely threatens global food security. A recent comprehensive analysis of the NLR gene complement across diverse potato (Solanum tuberosum) genomes identified previously undescribed resistance genes. This analysis prompted the design of the "domain plug-in" engineering strategy, which involves swapping functional domains between NLRs to broaden the scope of disease resistance. This approach provides a transformative blueprint for designing crops with durable, broad-spectrum disease resistance.
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