Green Vaccination: A Boon to Plant Immunity and Sustainability

Abstract

One of the biggest challenges for food security in the 21 st century is improving crop yield stability through the development of disease-resistant crops. Plants must deal with a variety of challenges that they encounter in the field. These environmental hazards result in enormous agricultural losses every year. The ever-increasing global population necessitates the development of sustainable crop protection tools. Green vaccination, or defence priming, is a chemical-free approach for plant protection. Plants, like humans, are vaccinated to protect themselves from threats. Plants are pretreated with a mild dose of biotic or abiotic stress in green vaccination. This weak or attenuated stimulus works as a priming signal and brings the plant into an alarmed or vigilant state, which leads to enhanced defence response upon future challenges. Green vaccination is the intentional, but regulated, “on demand defensive strategy” to increase plant defensive capacity. Although defence priming rarely provides complete protection, it is appealing for integrated disease management because of its broad range of effectiveness, long-term durability, and potential to be passed down to future generations. Transgenerational immune priming refers to the inheritance of defence priming from one generation to the next. Because it has no negative effects on the environment and provides long-term and even next-generation protection to the plant, it is a sustainable and environmentally benign approach to crop improvement.