Chinese Scientists Design Programmable Plant Immune Receptors from Scratch Using AI
A research team led by Gao Caixia at the Chinese Academy of Sciences has developed a programmable plant synthetic immunity platform to design custom immune receptors from scratch. Published in the journal *Science*, the team utilized AI tools like AlphaFold 3 and BindCraft to design and test 391 synthetic receptors, achieving an 18.2% success rate in activating immune responses. This breakthrough overcomes the limitations of natural disease-resistance genes, which are scarce and easily bypassed by rapidly mutating pathogens. By enabling the custom design of receptors based solely on pathogen protein structures, it offers a new pathway to protect crops against emerging diseases and secure global food production. The researchers integrated AI-designed binding proteins into the rice immune receptor Pikm-1 and optimized low-activity or self-activating receptors using an in vivo directed evolution system (GRAPE). The optimized synthetic receptors successfully conferred resistance to the Tomato brown rugose fruit virus in transgenic tobacco plants (*Nicotiana benthamiana*).
## BACKGROUND
Plants rely on intracellular NLR (nucleotide-binding leucine-rich repeat) receptors to detect pathogen proteins and trigger immune responses. Traditionally, engineering these receptors has been extremely difficult due to their complex structural domains, but advances in AI-driven protein design now allow scientists to create custom binding modules that target specific pathogen proteins.