Mosses and ferns may offer an exciting new research frontier in the global challenge of protecting crops from the threat of disease.
This is according to scientists at the UK’s John Innes Centre.
Non-flowering plants are often regarded as unsophisticated compared to their flowering relatives, which include major crops.
However, new research carried at the John Innes Centre has found that non-flowering bryophytes (liverworts, hornworts, and mosses) contain sophisticated immune receptors.
“The non-vascular and non-flowering bryophytes are often thought of as simple predecessors of flowering plants,” said Dr. Phil Carella, a group leader at the John Innes Centre.
“But we find that mosses in particular have an expanded set of immune receptors that are perhaps the most complex amongst plants.”
Significantly, biotechnological techniques have revealed that specific immune receptor proteins, which protect plants against pathogens, are transferable between flowering and non-flowering plants.
Mosses and ferns
“The exciting part of this study is that the diverse immunity found in non-flowering plants like mosses are transferable, so they offer us a source of new resistance genes against pathogens.”
The discovery opens exciting new possibilities for engineering immunity in major crops, which are facing a growing threat from emerging and rapidly evolving pathogens.
Plants have developed immune receptors to detect pathogens over millions of years. Their role in flowering plants is a well-studied subject.
However, much less is known about the form and function of receptors from mosses and other non flowering plants.
Bryophytes diverged from flowering plants over 500 million years ago, and knowledge of their immune systems is limited.
Up to this point, research scientists at the John Innes Centre have been able to transfer immune receptor genes obtained from liverwort into flowering plants.
The transfer process subsequently activated a strong immune responses in the host plant. The reverse was also true, as researchers found they could functionally transfer an immune domain from flowering plants into to non-flowering plants.
The fact that these immune responses are transferable and function across plant types is a breakthrough in understanding and offers practical applications for crop protection.
“This means that we can use non-flowering plants like mosses or liverworts as a source of new resistance genes against crop pathogens.
“We have shown that we can indeed leverage the vast evolutionary diversity of immune receptors from across the entirety of the plant kingdom.
“So, our scope to engineer immunity is therefore a lot larger than we originally thought,” Dr. Carella said.