China builds world’s first custom plant immunity system for epidemic response

Chinese scientists have created an AI-guided platform to engineer custom plant immune receptors to rapidly combat emerging diseases that threaten plants, including commercial crops vulnerable to devastating outbreaks. Their programmable synthetic immune receptors can be introduced into plants to help them detect proteins made by specific bacteria, viruses and fungi, triggering an immune response to neutralise the threat, according to the team. By leveraging protein design guided by artificial...