[Tailored Immunity] Tailored immune receptor engineering for resistance against rice blast disease

Ente: European Commission

Scadenza: 2027-06-01

Importo max: 242.260,56 EUR

Paese: EU

Descrizione

Fungal pathogens are a major constraint to crop production worldwide. As part of their virulence strategy, pathogens secrete effector proteins to manipulate host machinery and promote colonization. Effectors can be recognized by host immune receptors that launch a robust immune response that restricts pathogen spread. Pathogens quickly overcome immune receptor-mediated resistance by modifying or losing effectors to evade detection. In the Tailored Immunity project, our aim is to massively expand the effector recognition specificity of immune receptors to provide durable disease resistance against the fungus Magnaportha oryzae, the causal agent of blast disease, and one of the most destructive diseases of rice. In order to do this, we will use a host-target guided engineering approach to replace the heavy-metal associated (HMA) effector binding domain of nucleotide-binding and leucine-rich repeat domain (NLR) immune receptors from rice with the HMA domain of host proteins that are targeted by multiple M. oryzae effectors. We hypothesize that introducing the HMA domain of the newly identified effector hubs to NLRs will allow the simultaneous recognition of numerous effectors. As the pathogen would need to undergo complex mutation pathways to escape this detection, and since changing multiple effectors is presumably associated with high fitness costs, we expect that this new strategy will generate resistance that the pathogen has difficulties to overcome and that is therefore highly durable. By these means, this ambitious project promises to provide a proof-of-concept for a new knowledge-guided and powerful approach for the creation of durable immune receptors that will be highly valuable for the improvement of a large range of crop species. In addition to boosting host immunity, the Tailored Immunity project will provide invaluable information about how immune receptors can be engineered for tailored disease resistance in crops.

Settori: plant immune receptors, plant resistance, effector target, hub, molecular engineering, plant disease, crop biotechnology

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