Plant immunity: new working principles and prospects for agriculture

Disease outbreaks in crops reduce global yields by about 30% each year. Harnessing the natural capacity of plants to block microbial infections would help shift towards more environmentally sustainable agriculture. Researchers have made significant progress in understanding molecular mechanisms of pathogen detection by dedicated immune receptors and how, once activated, these proteins mobilize defence programs to stop disease. The discovery of a set of immune receptor-generated nucleotide signalling molecules and their modes of action clears a new path for engineering crop disease resistance.