Plant diseases seriously threaten global agricultural production and food security, causing hundreds of billions of dollars in economic losses every year. Cultivating and promoting disease-resistant crop varieties is one of the core strategies for green prevention and control of plant diseases. Researcher Gao Caixia's team from the Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences first proposed a new concept of “programmable plant synthetic immunity”. By integrating artificial intelligence-assisted protein design, modular immune receptor engineering, and targeted evolution technology in plants, a programmable synthetic plant immune receptor design platform was established, and accurate customized design of plant immune receptors was achieved. This achievement breaks through the limitations of natural disease-resistant genetic resources and provides a new technical route for rapidly responding to emerging diseases and pathogen variants. The relevant results were published in the international academic journal “Science” on July 24.

Plant diseases seriously threaten global agricultural production and food security, causing hundreds of billions of dollars in economic losses every year. Cultivating and promoting disease-resistant crop varieties is one of the core strategies for green prevention and control of plant diseases. Researcher Gao Caixia's team from the Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences first proposed a new concept of “programmable plant synthetic immunity”. By integrating artificial intelligence-assisted protein design, modular immune receptor engineering, and targeted evolution technology in plants, a programmable synthetic plant immune receptor design platform was established, and accurate customized design of plant immune receptors was achieved. This achievement breaks through the limitations of natural disease-resistant genetic resources and provides a new technical route for rapidly responding to emerging diseases and pathogen variants. The relevant results were published in the international academic journal “Science” on July 24.