Scientists make breakthrough discovery that could give major boost to food supply: 'A particularly unexpected finding'

Although cold shock proteins help organisms from bacteria to humans adapt to cold stress and changing environments, researchers led by Ken Shirasu at the RIKEN Center for Sustainable Resource Science have found a way to use their detection to expand plant immunity.

Variations of cold shock proteins (CSPs) are found in more than 85% of known bacteria, as well as fungi and insects. The researchers discovered that an ancient protein, dubbed SCORE, can be modified to expand detection of CSPs to help crops and trees recognize a broader spectrum of pathogens, according to a RIKEN report shared by Phys.org.

Plants have natural receptor proteins that recognize molecules from pathogens when the two fit together, triggering an immune response. However, those receptors are limited as to which pathogens they can identify and respond to. 

Recent research has shown that immune receptors from one branch of the plant family tree can be transferred to another lineage, providing defenses that they don't naturally have, the report explained. 

Shirasu and his team focused on a strategy to identify receptor-microbe pairs in order to improve the scientific knowledge in the field, which they said is severely lacking, given that only 10 that exist in nature have been identified to date.

By analyzing over 1,300 receptors from the genomes of 350 plant species, the research team was able to identify an unknown immune receptor in the pomelo, a non-hybrid citrus fruit native to Southeast Asia. 

That receptor reacted to some, but not all cold shock proteins, which earned it the name "Selective COld shock protein REceptor," which the team abbreviated as SCORE.

Most pathogens, with the exception of viruses, produce at least one cold shock protein, and while most of their 15 amino acids are the same across species, five locations vary tremendously. 

In addition, the research team said they found 60 variations of SCORE that were specific to different plant lineages and were able to trace the origins to the last common ancestor of all flowering plants. 

"This was a particularly unexpected finding," explains co-author Yasuhiro Kadota in the RIKEN report. 

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"The extensive natural variation in CSP recognition across SCORE orthologs from different plant lineages suggests that this kind of immune receptor has repeatedly evolved to fine-tune pathogen detection through specific amino acid substitutions."

The team then engineered new versions of a pomelo's SCORE, which expanded its capacity to recognize cold shock proteins from three different bacteria it wouldn't have normally been able to detect. 

The United Nations estimated that food production will need to increase by 60% by 2050 in order to feed a growing population, while crop losses due to pests and pathogens threaten that potential supply. 

Scientific researchers are responding to this crisis with intelligent and informed solutions, including engineering more resilient crops to deal with drought, extreme weather, and disease.

Genetic engineering can boost biomass and yields, while advanced sensors are helping farmers monitor the status of crops as an early warning system. 

"Our next objective is to introduce engineered SCORE variants into economically important crop species in efforts to confer broad-spectrum resistance against pathogens and pests," said Bruno Pok Man Ngou, the SCORE study's first author. 

"This offers a sustainable approach to enhancing disease and pest resilience in agriculture and contributes to global food security."

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