Plant NLR diversity: the known unknowns of pan-NLRomes

Plants and pathogens constantly adapt to each other. As a consequence, many members of the plant immune system, and especially the intracellular nucleotide-binding site leucine-rich repeat receptors, also known as NOD-like receptors (NLRs), are highly diversified, both among family members in the same genome, and between individuals in the same species. While this diversity has long been appreciated, its true extent has remained unknown. With pan-genome and pan-NLRome studies becoming more and more comprehensive, our knowledge of NLR sequence diversity is growing rapidly, and pan-NLRomes provide powerful platforms for assigning function to NLRs. These efforts are an important step toward the goal of comprehensively predicting from sequence alone whether an NLR provides disease resistance, and if so, to which pathogens.

Plant pan-NLRomes aim to fully capture intraspecific diversity of the highly variable NLR immune receptors, enabling systematic analyses of NLR genes and alleles and their roles in disease resistance.