Engineering plant immunity: from nucleotide-binding leucine-rich repeat receptor functional mechanisms to practical applications

Abstract Plants employ a two-tiered immune system to defend against pathogen invasion. While understanding immune activation mechanisms is crucial for designing disease-resistant crops, evolutionary divergence often imposes functional constraints on the deployment of immune receptors across distantly related species. Recent research by Du et al. (Cell, 2025, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2025.05.028 ) has addressed this issue, overcoming restricted taxonomic functionality and enabling the broader utilization of nucleotide-binding leucine-rich repeat receptors (NLRs).