Seeing is believing: Exploiting advances in structural biology to understand and engineer plant immunity.

Filamentous plant pathogens cause disease in numerous economically important crops. These pathogens secrete virulence proteins, termed effectors, that modulate host cellular processes and promote infection. Plants have evolved immunity receptors that detect effectors and activate defence pathways, resulting in resistance to the invading pathogen. This leads to an evolutionary arms race between pathogen and host that is characterised by highly diverse effector repertoires in plant pathogens. Here, we review the recent advances in understanding host-pathogen co-evolution provided by the structural determination of effectors alone, and in complex with immunity receptors. We highlight the use of recent advances in structural prediction within this field and its role for future development of designer resistance proteins.

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Copyright © 2022 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd.. All rights reserved.

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Declaration of competing interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this article.