A built-in brake for plant immunity: Resistance (R) protein–mediated immunity is fine-tuned by R gene analogs
Jiahui Nie, Lang Liu, Yetong Qi, Chengyu Zhu, Zeng Liu, Xinya Wu, Jing Zhou, Jie Wu, Meng Xu, Hongjun Li, Xinyuan Sun, Mingshuo Fan, Ruimin Yu, Huishan Qiu, Qingguo Sun, Shengxuan Liu, Paul R. J. Birch, Zhendong Tian · 2026
Read A built-in brake for plant immunity: Resistance (R) protein–mediated immunity is fine-tuned by R gene analogs by Jiahui Nie, Lang Liu, Yetong Qi, Chengyu Zhu, Zeng Liu, Xinya Wu, Jing Zhou, Jie Wu, Meng Xu, Hongjun Li, Xinyuan Sun, Mingshuo Fan, Ruimin Yu, Huishan Qiu, Qingguo Sun, Shengxuan Liu, Paul R. J. Birch, Zhendong Tian (2026) in the Tower of Babel, a free online library of public-domain works preserved in clean, searchable text. No sign-up. The full text is served as a plain-text file at a predictable URL, where text is present: https://antarctic-labs.com/tower-of-babel/pmc-13580548.txt.
Description
Potato late blight has ruined harvests for two centuries, and most resistance genes bred against it fall within years as the pathogen evolves. One gene, R8, has held for nearly a century. Jiahui Nie and co-authors found that R8's durability may come from its own relatives acting as a brake. Look-alike copies of the gene sabotage its signalling: they blur its recognition of the invader and jam a helper protein it needs.
Forcing plants to overproduce these analogs weakened R8 resistance in both potato and a test plant. The authors propose the brake keeps immune fire moderate, which eases the pressure on the pathogen to evolve around the gene. That built-in restraint, they argue, offers a design principle for breeding resistance that lasts.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Jiahui Nie, Lang Liu, Yetong Qi, Chengyu Zhu, Zeng Liu, Xinya Wu, Jing Zhou, Jie Wu, Meng Xu, Hongjun Li, Xinyuan Sun, Mingshuo Fan, Ruimin Yu, Huishan Qiu, Qingguo Sun, Shengxuan Liu, Paul R. J. Birch, Zhendong Tian |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2026 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 57 KB |
| VERSION | 1.0 |
| LICENSE | CC BY 4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |