Engineering CC-HMA-NLR immune receptors for disease resistance in crops (ERiC)

每年，我们全球主要粮食作物的大量产量都因收获前植物病害而损失。这些疾病由病原微生物如真菌、卵菌、细菌和害虫引起。这些产量损失是与世界对粮食日益增长的需求相对照的，随着世界人口的增长和饮食习惯的变化，粮食需求继续上升。植物有一个免疫系统，可以帮助它们抵御疾病。然而，与人类和其他哺乳动物不同，它们没有抗体，它们的第一道防线是抗病基因。这些基因中的许多编码免疫受体，其是具有检测病原体和害虫并激活免疫反应的功能的蛋白质。一些植物免疫受体充当传感器-它们携带特定区域，作为检测病原体分子的诱饵。诱饵的身份决定了传感器检测特定类型寄生虫的能力。病原体和害虫通常适应于在特定宿主上引起疾病，因此植物/寄生虫的共同进化导致了各种植物中编码的具有不同寄生虫检测机制的多种免疫受体。在我们实验室以前的工作中，我们确定了一些植物受体感知和诱饵病原体分子的分子细节。我们成功地在分子水平上成像了植物和病原体蛋白质之间的接触点。我们还进一步发现，植物传感器结合病原体分子的强度与植物免疫反应的强度相关。这项工作为构建与病原体蛋白质结合强度更高的传感器，从而增强植物对病原体的抗性，开辟了新的途径。本项目将在这些研究的基础上进一步开发具有诱饵不同病原体分子的新领域的植物受体传感器。它有可能扩大受体在农业中的用途。我们将把工作重点放在稻瘟病菌上，这是一种威胁水稻、小麦和大麦等主要谷物粮食作物的病原体，是造成世界各地粮食不安全的主要因素。最近由这种微生物引起的疾病在亚洲和非洲的农作物上新的流行突出了病原体传播到新地区的潜力，以及我们迫切需要了解如何帮助植物反击。一旦我们了解如何设计新的植物传感器来检测入侵的病原体，我们将能够帮助保护水稻，小麦和其他重要的粮食作物免受疾病的侵害。

Every year, significant yields of our key global food crops are lost to pre-harvest plant disease. These diseases are caused by pathogenic micro-organisms such as fungi, oomycetes, bacteria, and pests. These yield losses are set against the world's increasing demands for food, which continue to rise as the world's population grows and there are changes in dietary habits. Plants have an immune system that helps defend them against disease. However, unlike humans and other mammals, they don't have antibodies and their first line of defence are disease resistance genes. Many of these genes encode immune receptors, which are proteins that function to detect pathogens and pests, and activate the immune response. Some plant immune receptors act as sensors - they carry specific regions that serve as baits for detecting pathogen molecules. The identity of the bait determines the capacity of the sensor to detect a particular type of a parasite. Pathogens and pests are often adapted to cause disease on a particular host, so plant/parasite co-evolution has led to a diverse set of immune receptors encoded in various plants with different mechanisms for parasite detection.In previous work by our laboratories, we determined the molecular details by which some plant receptors sense and bait pathogen molecules. We succeeded in imaging the contact points between the plant and pathogen proteins at the molecular level. We also went on to discover that the strength with which the plant sensor binds the pathogen molecule correlates with the strength of the plant's immune response. This work opened up new avenues for engineering better plant responses against pathogens by building sensors with increased strength of binding to pathogen proteins, and therefore conferring enhanced resistance to disease.This project will further build on these studies and will develop plant receptor sensors with new domains that bait different pathogen molecules. It has the potential to expand the usefulness of the receptors in agriculture. We will focus our work on the blast fungus Magnaporthe oryzae, a pathogen that threatens staple cereal food crops like rice, wheat and barley and is a major contributor to food insecurity around the world. Recent new epidemics of the disease caused by this organism on crops in Asia and Africa have highlighted the potential for the pathogen spreading to new areas, and the critical need for us to understand how we can help plants fight back.Once we understand how to engineer new plant sensors to detect invading pathogens, we will be able to help protect rice, wheat and other important food crops from disease.