Discovery

We use the methods to identify fundamental principles of how plant immunity works. The questions sit at the receptor end of the response: how an NLR recognises an effector, how helper and sensor NLRs share signalling load, how networks of receptors keep working when individual receptors break, and what an evolutionarily durable receptor actually looks like.

Sensor and helper NLR networks

Many plant NLRs do not act alone. They form networks where sensor NLRs recognise the pathogen and pass the signal to helper NLRs that execute the immune response. The NRC (NLR-Required-for-Cell-death) network of solanaceous plants is the lab's model system. Recent work has characterised how NRC3 mediates Cf-4-triggered cell death (Kourelis et al., PLOS Genetics 2022), how NRC3 has subfunctionalised across Nicotiana (Huang et al., PLOS Genetics 2024), and how a cyst-nematode effector targets NRC3 (Sugihara et al., PLOS Genetics 2025).

Mechanisms of effector recognition

How a receptor binds an effector determines what it can recognise. Structural and biochemical work on the receptor-effector interface — including allelic compatibility studies (Bentham et al., Plant Cell 2023) — feeds the engineering effort directly.

NLR evolution at extreme rates

Plant NLR genes evolve faster than almost any other gene family in plant genomes. This makes phylogenetic methods that assume slow, near-neutral change unreliable on NLR data. Work on ZAR1 (Adachi et al., Plant Cell 2023) showed that a small subset of NLRs nevertheless remain conserved over hundreds of millions of years; understanding which features make a receptor evolvable versus durable is an ongoing thread.

Cell-surface and intracellular immunity

Plant immunity is layered: cell-surface receptors detect extracellular signals and intracellular NLRs detect what gets through. The two layers are connected (Kourelis, New Phytologist 2023). We work on the molecular logic of that connection.