Skip to main content
ISMPMI Congress 2025 Main banner
Icon Legend
This session is not in your schedule.
This session is in your schedule. Click again to remove it.

Plenary Session

Session: Plenary Session 6

Durable rust resistance in cereals

Wednesday, July 16, 2025
17:30 - 17:55  
Location: Confex Hall 1+2

    Speaker(s)

  • SK

    Simon Krattinger (he/him/his)

    King Abdullah University of Science and Technology
    Thuwal, Saudi Arabia

    • Author(s)

  • UF

    Urooj Fatima

    Postdoctoral Fellow
    King Abdullah University of Science and Technology
    Thuwal, Makkah, Saudi Arabia

  • UH

    Umar Shahul Hameed

    King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), Saudi Arabia

  • NA

    Natalia Arango Lopez

    King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), Saudi Arabia

  • NR

    Naganand Rayapuram

    King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), Saudi Arabia

  • HH

    Heribert Hirt

    Group Leader
    King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST)
    Thuwal, Makkah, Saudi Arabia

  • MA

    Michael Abrouk

    King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), Saudi Arabia

  • YW

    Yajun Wang

    King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), Saudi Arabia

  • JJ

    Jonathan D. G. Jones

    Prof. Group leader
    The Sainsbury Laboratory
    Norwich, England, United Kingdom

  • SA

    Stefan Arold

    King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), Saudi Arabia

Cereal rusts are devastating fungal pathogens that cause significant yield losses in wheat and other cereals. Despite decades of research and breeding efforts, achieving durable rust resistance remains a challenge. Non-host resistance (NHR) describes the resistance of an entire host species to all genetic variants of a pathogen. Due to its broad-spectrum specificity, NHR has often been described as a particularly durable type of disease resistance. Cereal rusts exhibit a high degree of host specificity, making them ideal models for studying the genetic and molecular mechanisms underlying NHR.
Previously, we identified orthologous lectin receptor kinases in domesticated (Hv-LecRK) and wild bulbous barley (Hb-LecRK) that play a role in recognizing non-adapted leaf rust species. Here, we integrate proteomics, structural analyses, and biochemical approaches to identify a leaf rust-derived protein that interacts with the two barley lectin receptor kinases, triggering a cell death response. This rust-derived ligand is conserved across different rust species, and potentially indispensable for pathogenicity. Our findings offer novel insights into the molecular mechanisms of NHR and the evolutionary processes shaping host specificity in cereal-rust interactions. Furthermore, our work forms the basis for structure-guided engineering of lectin receptor kinases with enhanced and novel recognition specificities.