Plant biology: An immunity boost combats crop disease.

Abstract

Plants precisely express some immune regulators by controlling the translation of messenger RNA into protein. This insight enabled a disease-resistant rice to be engineered without compromised productivity. See Letters p.487 & p.491 It is well established that plants elicit immune responses by reprogramming their transcriptional response. Through global translatome analysis, Xinnian Dong and colleagues observe that plants also modify their translational output independently of the changes in the transcriptional output to establish pathogen-triggered immunity. They thus uncover new regulators of plant immune responses and identify the molecular signature of the messenger RNAs that undergo changes in translational efficiency in this context. This knowledge has implications for generating disease-resistant plants, as the authors demonstrate in an accompanying paper published in this issue. In both laboratory and field studies, they show that engineering translational control into Arabidopsis and rice to promote production of immune mediators confers disease resistance without compromising plant fitness. It is well established that plants elicit immune responses by reprogramming their transcriptional response. Controlling this for agricultural purposes without reducing the plant's fitness has been a challenge. Xinnian Dong and colleagues have engineered translational control into Arabidopsis and rice to promote production of immune mediators and show, in laboratory and field studies, that this confers disease resistance without compromising plant fitness. This was achieved using insights from a related paper published in this issue, in which Xinnian Dong and colleagues uncover new regulators of plant immune responses. Through global translatome analysis, they observe that plants modify their translational output independently of the changes in the transcriptional output to establish pathogen-triggered immunity.