Crops of the future: building a climate-resilient plant immune system

• Published in: Current opinion in plant biology Vol. 60; p. 101997
• Main Authors: Kim, Jong Hum, Hilleary, Richard, Seroka, Adam, He, Sheng Yang
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: England Elsevier Ltd 01.04.2021
• Subjects: Climate Change; Crops, Agricultural - genetics; Plant Immunity - genetics
• ISSN: 1369-5266; 1879-0356
• DOI: 10.1016/j.pbi.2020.101997

•Climate change has a significant impact on the plant immune system.•Pan-genomes of crop species likely hold important alleles for climate and disease resilience.•CRISPR-Cas technology may revolutionize crop engineering for climate and disease resilience. A grand challenge facing plant scientists today is to find innovative solutions to increase global crop production in the context of an increasingly warming climate. A major roadblock to global food sufficiency is persistent loss of crops to plant diseases and insect infestations. The United Nations has declared 2020 as the International Year of Plant Health. For historical reasons, molecular studies of plant-biotic interactions in the past several decades have not paid enough attention to how variable climate conditions affect plant-biotic interactions. Here, we highlight a few recent studies that begin to reveal how major climatic drivers impact the plant immune system, particularly secondary messenger and defense hormone signaling, and discuss possible approaches toward engineering climate-resilient plant immunity as part of an ongoing global effort to design ‘dream’ crops of the future.