When plants encounter pathogen invasion, intracellular NLR immune receptors rapidly assemble into “resistosomes” to initiate defense responses. However, a central question has long remained unresolved: how does resistosome activation drive cells toward hypersensitive cell death?
In this study, we employed high-resolution live-cell imaging to construct, for the first time, a comprehensive spatiotemporal map of cell death following resistosome activation. Our findings reveal that this process is not an instantaneous collapse, but rather a highly ordered cascade of events. It begins with a rapid influx of intracellular calcium ions, followed by disruption of organelle dynamics. This is succeeded by cytoskeletal disassembly, ultimately leading to nuclear shrinkage and vacuolar collapse, completing the hypersensitive cell death response.
This work establishes a mechanistic framework for the execution phase of plant immune cell death, demonstrating how resistosomes precisely coordinate multiple structural changes across space and time to convert immune signals into an irreversible cellular fate. This represents a significant advance in our understanding of plant innate immunity and provides a solid theoretical foundation for future efforts to fine-tune disease resistance in crops.
This research was supported by the NSTC Emerging Young Scholar Program. The co–first authors are Yi-Feng Chen, a research assistant at the Institute of Plant and Microbial Biology, Academia Sinica, and Kuan-Yu Lin, a master’s student in the Department of Plant Pathology and Microbiology at National Taiwan University. The study was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on March 19, 2026.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2523470123
