Did you know plants have immune systems? They do! They actively fight off infections. Jeffery L. Dangl, a distinguished Professor here in UNC’s Biology Department won the Wolf Prize Laureate in Agriculture 2025 “for groundbreaking discoveries of the immune system and disease resistance in plants.”
Some of the award explanation is copied here: “Plants are susceptible to various pathogens, including fungi, bacteria, and viruses. Infection can threaten the global food supply. Individuals within the same plant species were known to exhibit varying disease resistance levels due to dominant alleles at resistance genes… but how plant disease resistance genes [work] remained unknown until the mid-1990s.
Much of our current knowledge of the plant immune system stems from the groundbreaking discoveries made by Jeffery Dangl [and other other prize winners], Jonathan Jones, and Brian Staskawicz. Jones and Dangl independently uncovered [how] immune receptors are activated through the indirect recognition of pathogen-effector proteins by extracellular and intracellular immune receptors, respectively. The discovery of pathogen effector proteins and plant immune receptors helped illuminate how these receptors are activated upon pathogen detection and helped reveal the downstream signaling pathways.
A landmark 2006 Nature review by Dangl and Jones provided the first detailed, and now textbook, model of the plant immune system. In a 2024 review in Cell, Jones, Dangl, and Staskawicz summarized fifty years of discoveries in plant immunity Their combined contributions significantly shaped our current understanding of the field, leading to targeted strategies to enhance resistance and to control a broad spectrum of plant diseases.
#GDTBATH !