Plants posses an intricate innate immune system that enables them to fight off most invading pathogens. Around the world, agriculture relies on robust disease resistance to ensure adequate food and feed production. Researchers and breeders are constantly generating new resistant crop varieties mostly employing the lengthy process of conventional breeding. Nonetheless, crop losses due to plant pathogens are estimated to be over 15% every year - the main cause of such losses is rapid evolution of new virulent races. In order to keep up with emerging pathogens, we need to gain a deeper and more systematic understanding of the immune system of our crops. During the past two decades, molecular understanding of plant innate immune signaling has been greatly expanded using dicotyledonous model systems such as Arabidopsis thaliana. Now, it is time to connect this volume of knowledge with the immune system of the crop species.
In this Research Topic we aim to collect manuscripts covering the current knowledge of the immune systems of major crop species. Specifically, we encourage the submission of manuscripts (Original Research, Hypothesis & Theory, Methods, Reviews, Mini Reviews, Perspective and Opinion) covering the following topics:
a. Manuscripts describing our current understanding of the plant immune system with a focus on crop species or comparative analyses between model systems and crops.
b. Manuscripts exploring how to best exploit our insight into genomes of plant pathogens and molecular understanding of effector function.
c. Manuscripts debating (novel) strategies of how to generate more resistant crop varieties. These might include biotechnological, social and economical aspects of crop improvement.
We anticipate that this Research Topic will become an important resource for plant immunologists especially those interested in comparative studies of plant innate immune systems of model systems and crop species.
Plants posses an intricate innate immune system that enables them to fight off most invading pathogens. Around the world, agriculture relies on robust disease resistance to ensure adequate food and feed production. Researchers and breeders are constantly generating new resistant crop varieties mostly employing the lengthy process of conventional breeding. Nonetheless, crop losses due to plant pathogens are estimated to be over 15% every year - the main cause of such losses is rapid evolution of new virulent races. In order to keep up with emerging pathogens, we need to gain a deeper and more systematic understanding of the immune system of our crops. During the past two decades, molecular understanding of plant innate immune signaling has been greatly expanded using dicotyledonous model systems such as Arabidopsis thaliana. Now, it is time to connect this volume of knowledge with the immune system of the crop species.
In this Research Topic we aim to collect manuscripts covering the current knowledge of the immune systems of major crop species. Specifically, we encourage the submission of manuscripts (Original Research, Hypothesis & Theory, Methods, Reviews, Mini Reviews, Perspective and Opinion) covering the following topics:
a. Manuscripts describing our current understanding of the plant immune system with a focus on crop species or comparative analyses between model systems and crops.
b. Manuscripts exploring how to best exploit our insight into genomes of plant pathogens and molecular understanding of effector function.
c. Manuscripts debating (novel) strategies of how to generate more resistant crop varieties. These might include biotechnological, social and economical aspects of crop improvement.
We anticipate that this Research Topic will become an important resource for plant immunologists especially those interested in comparative studies of plant innate immune systems of model systems and crop species.
