UK researchers engineer plant immunity against devastating blast fungus

Each year, a silent fungal adversary consumes enough rice to sustain sixty million lives, and its reach is expanding — from Asian paddies to African wheat fields, with temperate Europe potentially next. Researchers at the John Innes Centre, working alongside colleagues in Japan, have now mapped the molecular handshake between blast fungus and its plant hosts with enough precision to begin rewriting the terms of that encounter. By engineering a newly understood class of immune receptors called tandem kinase proteins, they have demonstrated that crops can be given recognition abilities they neve