Chinese scientists have proposed a novel concept of programmable plant synthetic immunity, marking a milestone breakthrough in plant immune engineering.

The achievement establishes an on-demand design platform for synthetic plant immune receptors, providing a universal technical pathway for cultivating durable and broad-spectrum crop resistance.

The study, led by a team from the Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology (IGDB) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, was published online in the journal Science on July 24.

For millennia, crop resistance breeding has relied on mining natural resistance genes. However, the complex structure of natural plant immune receptors makes them extremely difficult to engineer, and discovering new natural resistance genes is a lengthy and inefficient endeavor, leaving “precise design of dedicated resistance receptors against any pathogen” a long-standing unsolved problem in plant immunity.

By targeting a unique class of atypical immune receptors that utilize compact, modular integrated decoy domains to recognise pathogen proteins, the Chinese team overcame the inherent limitations of traditional receptor engineering.

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Leveraging breakthroughs in artificial intelligence (AI) protein design technology, the team proposed a bold new approach: using AI to design high-affinity binding proteins targeting pathogen proteins from scratch, thus replacing natural decoy domains to construct entirely new synthetic immune receptors.

This platform marks a paradigm shift from “utilizing nature” to “directional creation” in crop resistance breeding. Unlike traditional breeding models, this technology enables the “on-demand creation of resistance genes.”

“The deep integration of AI, protein engineering and plant directed evolution has given us the ability to autonomously design plant immune systems,” said Gao Caixia, a researcher at the IGDB.

She noted that the concept of programmable plant synthetic immunity has established a complete technological chain for artificially creating crop resistance. In the future, dedicated immune receptors can be rapidly developed against emerging and mutated pathogens, providing an original Chinese solution in the quest for global food security.