(Press-News.org) In a groundbreaking study published in Science, a research team led by Prof. YE Jian from the Institute of Microbiology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences has identified the first mechanism of citrus resistance to citrus greening disease, or huanglongbing (HLB).
Utilizing artificial intelligence (AI), the team has also developed antimicrobial peptides that offer a promising therapeutic approach to combat the disease. This discovery addresses a long-standing challenge in the agricultural community—the absence of naturally occurring HLB-resistant genes in citrus.
Citrus greening disease is one of the most destructive plant diseases in modern agriculture, causing billions of dollars in losses annually. The disease, primarily triggered by the bacterium Candidatus Liberibacter asiaticus (CLas), is spread by the Asian citrus psyllid (Diaphorina citri). With no known cure, HLB has devastated millions of acres of citrus crops across 50 countries in Asia, Africa, the Americas, and Europe, making it a "100-year disease" due to its profound impact and the difficulty of eradication. All commercial citrus varieties are susceptible, and once infected, trees typically perish within a few years.
To address this issue, the researchers identified a key resistance pathway involving the transcription factor MYC2 and its interacting E3 ligase, PUB21. By examining citrus species and their distant relatives in the Rutaceae family, they discovered PUB21 paralogs in Bergera koenigii (curry leaf plant) and Zanthoxylum bungeanum (Sichuan pepper plant). These paralogs encode a dominant-negative form of PUB21 (PUB21DN), featuring a crucial mutation at residue 39 that suppresses PUB21 activity. This suppression stabilizes the MYC2 protein and significantly enhances defense pathways and antibacterial metabolites production, conferring immunity to HLB. Transgenic citrus plants engineered to overexpress PUB21DN demonstrated increased resistance to the disease.
Building on these natural resistance mechanisms, the researchers used AI-driven screening technology to stabilize MYC2 by inhibiting PUB21 activity. Through this approach, they identified a group of anti-proteolysis peptides (APPs), including APP3-14, which showed promising results in both greenhouse and field trials. APP3-14 not only effectively controlled the HLB-causing pathogen CLas but also disrupted disease transmission, achieving a up to 80% control efficiency in a single season.
This breakthrough offers a dual benefit: the development of druggable peptides for eco-friendly bio-pesticides and a novel strategy to combat uncultivable pathogens through targeted protein stabilization. Beyond HLB, this strategy could help address other plant diseases caused by difficult-to-culture pathogens, such as maize rust fungus and Xylella fastidiosa, which leads to Olive Quick Decline Syndrome (OQDS). By targeting pathogen effectors and stabilizing host immune proteins, this study paves the way for innovative disease resistance solutions in various crops, offering new hope for global agricultural sustainability.
END
Scientists decode citrus greening resistance and develop AI-assisted treatment
2025-04-10
[Attachments] See images for this press release:
ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:
Venom characteristics of a deadly snake can be predicted from local climate
2025-04-10
Local climate can be used to predict the venom characteristics of a deadly snake that is widespread in India, helping clinicians to provide targeted therapies for snake bite victims, according to a study publishing April 10 in the open-access journal PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases by Kartik Sunagar and colleagues at the Indian Institute of Science.
Russell’s viper (Daboia russelii) is found across the Indian subcontinent and is responsible for over 40% of snake ...
Brain pathway links inflammation to loss of motivation, energy in advanced cancer
2025-04-10
The fatigue and lack of motivation that many cancer patients experience near the end of life have been seen as the unavoidable consequences of their declining physical health and extreme weight loss. But new research from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis challenges that long-held assumption, showing instead that these behavioral changes stem from specific inflammation-sensing neurons in the brain.
In a study published April 11 in Science, the researchers report that they identified a direct connection between cancer-related inflammation ...
Researchers discover large dormant virus can be reactivated in model green alga
2025-04-10
Researchers had been studying the green alga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii for decades without seeing evidence of an active virus within it — until a pair of Virginia Tech researchers waded into the conversation.
Maria Paula Erazo-Garcia and Frank Aylward not only found a virus in the alga but discovered the largest one ever recorded with a latent infection cycle, meaning it goes dormant in the host before being reactivated to cause disease.
“We’ve known about latent infections for a long time,” said Aylward, associate professor in the Department of Biological Sciences. ...
New phase of the immune response uncovered
2025-04-10
The research groups led by Wolfgang Kastenmüller and Georg Gasteiger employed innovative microscopy techniques to observe how specific immune cells, known as T-cells, are activated and proliferate during a viral infection. Their findings revealed novel mechanisms: the immune system amplifies its defense cells in a far more targeted way than previously believed.
T-Cells Proliferate and Specialize During the Immune Response
T-cells are crucial defense cells in the immune system. To effectively ...
Drawing board rather than salt shaker
2025-04-10
Bioinformaticians from Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf (HHU) and the university in Linköping (Sweden) have established that the genes in bacterial genomes are arranged in a meaningful order. In the renowned scientific journal Science, they describe that the genes are arranged by function: If they become increasingly important at faster growth, they are located near the origin of DNA replication. Accordingly, their position influences how their activity changes with the growth rate.
Are genes distributed randomly along the bacterial chromosome, as if scattered from a salt shaker? This opinion, which is held by a majority of researchers, has ...
Engineering invites submissions on AI for engineering
2025-04-10
Artificial intelligence (AI) is playing an increasingly pivotal role in revolutionizing the field of engineering, triggering a new era of technological and industrial evolution. A series of recent breakthroughs in areas like natural language processing, computer vision, and machine learning, with the Nobel Prize-winning work in artificial neural networks and protein structure prediction serving as prime examples, have effectively bridged the gap between the physical and digital worlds. The emergence of general AI technologies, especially large language models, has given rise ...
In Croatia’s freshwater lakes, selfish bacteria hoard nutrients
2025-04-10
Bacteria play key roles in degrading organic matter, both in the soil and in aquatic ecosystems. While most bacteria digest large molecules externally, allowing other community members to share and scavenge, some bacteria selfishly take up entire molecules before digesting them internally. In a paper publishing April 10 in the Cell Press journal Cell Reports, researchers document “selfish polysaccharide uptake” in freshwater ecosystems for the first time. In Croatia’s Kozjak and Crniševo Lakes, they found that nutrient hoarding allows selfish species ...
Research suggests our closest neighboring galaxy may be being torn apart
2025-04-10
A team led by Satoya Nakano and Kengo Tachihara at Nagoya University in Japan has revealed new insights into the motion of massive stars in the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC), a small galaxy neighboring the Milky Way. Their findings suggest that the gravitational pull of the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), the SMC’s larger companion, may be tearing the smaller one apart. This discovery reveals a new pattern in the motion of these stars that could transform our understanding of galaxy evolution and interactions. The results were published ...
Researchers identify factors in early-life linked to body fat in South Asian children
2025-04-10
Researchers at McMaster University have identified six key factors in the first three years of life that influence the trajectory of obesity in South Asian children.
The findings offer parents, primary care practitioners and policymakers new insights into addressing childhood obesity for a group of children who have a higher prevalence of abdominal fat and cardiometabolic risk factors, as well as a predisposition to diabetes.
“We know that current measures of childhood obesity such as the body mass index (BMI) don’t work well for South Asians because of the so called ‘thin-fat’ phenotype: South Asian newborns are characterized as low birth weight, but proportionally ...
Environment: Less than 10% of global plastics manufactured from recycled materials
2025-04-10
Only 9.5% of plastic materials produced globally in 2022 were manufactured from recycled materials. The findings, reported in Communications Earth & Environment, are part of a comprehensive analysis of the global plastics sector, which also reveals a large increase in the amount of plastic being disposed of by incineration and substantial regional differences in plastic consumption.
Plastic production has increased from two million tonnes per year in 1950 to 400 million tonnes per year in 2022 and ...