Game-changing biotech for engineering pathogen-resistant crops

RIKEN

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The ancient immune receptor SCORE was discovered in the pomelo fruit, but over 60 orthologs were subsequently found in other plant orders and families. Synthetic SCOREs engineered with subtle variations predictably reacted to bacteria that pomelo SCORE cannot recognize. Engineering custom SCOREs could therefore be a powerful way to boost crop immunity to new pathogens.

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Credit: By Ivar Leidus - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=98324833

Researchers led by Ken Shirasu at the RIKEN Center for Sustainable Resource Science (CSRS) in Japan have identified an ancient protein that has the potential to help defend plants against tens of thousands of different bacteria and other pathogens. Dubbed “SCORE”, this receptor detects cold-shock protein—variations of which are found in more than 85% of known bacteria, as well as fungi and insects. Experiments published Sep 4 in Science revealed that simply swapping out key sections of SCORE with substitutes can predictably change the type of cold-shock protein, and thus pathogen, it recognizes. This strategy could be used engineer synthetic SCORE and provide plants, particularly crops and trees, with a means to defend themselves against whatever pathogens is plaguing them.

When flowering plants such as rice, wheat, olive trees, and bamboo become infected with pathogens, they are smaller and have less yield. Fortunately, plants have receptor proteins that recognize molecules from pathogens when the two fit together, triggering an immune response. Unfortunately, no immune receptor recognizes every current and future pathogens. However, recent research has shown that immune receptors specific to plants from one branch of the plant family tree, such as cabbages and broccoli, can be transferred to another lineage, like tomatoes and potatoes, giving them a defense that they don’t naturally have.

This sounds easy, but the reality is that of the hundreds of thousands of possible receptor-microbe pairs that exist in nature, to date, scientists have identified less than ten, and all in model species with well-known genomes. Without knowing which receptors recognize which microbes, not much can be done to improve conditions in the field. In their new study, Shirasu and his group at RIKEN CSRS focused on developing a strategy for identifying these pairs.

Starting with over 1300 receptors from the genomes of 350 plant species, the researchers eventually identified an unknown immune receptor in the pomelo, a common citrus plant. A series of experiments revealed that this receptor reacts to some, but not all, cold-shock proteins. The researchers thus named it “Selective COld shock protein Receptor”, abbreviated as SCORE.

They determined that SCORE recognizes a small section of cold-shock proteins— called csp15 because it’s 15 amino acids long. Swapping out some of the csp15 amino acids with others changed which core-shock protein SCORE could recognize.

Detailed genome analysis showed that most pathogens, except viruses, produce at least one type of cold-shock protein. Comparing species, the team found that although most of the 15 amino acids in csp15 are conserved across species, locations 6, 7, 14, and 15 in the sequence vary tremendously. The researchers also found over 60 variations in SCORE that were specific to different plant lineages, and traced its origin to the last common ancestor of all flowering plants. This means that many of the plants that we use for food have variations of this immune receptor.

“This was a particularly unexpected finding,” explains co-author Yasuhiro Kodata. “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.”

Analysis of all the different SCOREs revealed the specific locations in its amino acid sequence that vary from lineage to lineage, and based on the charge, it was possible to predict which csp15s a given SCORE can recognize. The next logical step was to take pomelo SCORE and engineer new versions that recognize different pathogens by swapping out the key sections with alternatives. For example, although natural pomelo SCORE does not recognize core-shock protein from Ralstonia, Erwinia, or Xanthomonas species of bacteria, the researchers synthesized a new SCORE version that reacts to all of these.

“In the short term,” says Shirasu, “this study provides a new framework for identifying and engineering immune receptors from non-model plants, especially long-lived perennials, for which genetic tools are limited.”

Added first author Bruno Pok Man Ngou, “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. This offers a sustainable approach to enhancing disease and pest resilience in agriculture and contributes to global food security.” 

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Journal

Science

DOI

10.1126/science.adx2508 

Article Title

Systematic discovery and engineering of synthetic immune receptors in plants

Article Publication Date

4-Sep-2025

Evolution of rodents’ unique thumbnail contributed to their successful radiation

Summary author: Walter Beckwith

American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)

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The humble rodent “thumb” may not seem like an obvious window into evolution, but its keratinized tip – the unguis (hoof, claw, or nail) – turns out to reveal striking insights into rodent history and adaptation, according to a new study. The findings suggest that rodents owe much of their evolutionary success to their thumb-nail (the first digit, D1), an adaptation that gave them dexterous hands for cracking seeds and nuts. The tetrapod (four-limbed vertebrate) hand is a crucial structure for interacting with the environment, and its digits show great evolutionary diversity in both form and function. Among them, the first digit – D1 – is especially intriguing: it is the last to appear during development, the first to be reduced or lost in evolution, and in some lineages, like primates, it has enabled dexterous behaviors, such as grasping or climbing. Yet, the unguis has rarely been studied in detail. In rodents, the most speciose group of mammals, the D1 may bear a nail, a claw, or no unguis at all, but the evolutionary patterns and functional significance of this variation remain poorly understood.

 

Here, Rafaela Missagia and colleagues use advanced phylogenetic comparative methods to systematically examine the diversity, evolutionary history, and behavioral correlates of the D1 ungis types across Rodentia. Missagia et al. found that a nail, rather than a claw, is both the most common and the likely ancestral condition. Fossil evidence suggests that rodents have borne nail-like D1s since at least the Oligocene, marking this feature as a longstanding hallmark of the group and a unique trait among related mammalian orders. According to the authors, the D1 nail may have coevolved with the rodent’s distinctive gnawing incisors, supporting dexterous manipulation of hard foods like nuts, which would have been a key ecological advantage during the group’s early diversification. Rodent species with D1 claws and those without a D1 unguis arose later in specialized linages, likely to support specific behaviors; claws to subterranean or burrowing lineages, and the loss of the unguis to lineages that rely more heavily on oral feeding than hand use.

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Journal

Science

DOI

10.1126/science.ads7926 

Article Title

Evolution of thumbnails across Rodentia

Article Publication Date

4-Sep-2025

 

Most rodents have thumbnails instead of claws. It might help explain how they took over the world.

Field Museum

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Researchers (left to right) Gordon Shepherd, Anderson Feijó, Lauren Johnson, and Rafaela Missagia, working in the Field Museum’s mammal collections.

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Credit: Photo credit: Field Museum.

Picture a squirrel eating an acorn. It’s holding the nut in its front paws. More specifically, squirrels handle their food with their thumbs. And instead of the thin, curved claws on the rest of the squirrel’s fingers, their thumbs have smooth, flat nails. 

For hundreds of years, scientists have noticed that some rodents, including squirrels, have thumbnails instead of claws. But no one went through the whole rodent family tree and documented which ones have nails and which ones have claws. In a new paper published in Science, researchers examined hundreds of rodents in museum collections to see where thumbnails crop up. This study could help explain how rodents evolved into so many different species that thrive all over the world.

“When I talk with people about this research, I always start by asking, ‘Did you know rodents have thumbnails?’ Most people don’t. I didn’t. I had studied rodents for years, and I didn’t know anything about their nails until I started working on this project at the Field Museum,” says Field Museum’s research associate Rafaela Missagia, an assistant professor at the University of São Paulo in Brazil and an author of the study. 

The Field Museum in Chicago is home to one of the world’s largest collections of mammals, and as rodents make up about 40% of all known mammal species, there are lots and lots of rodent specimens at the Field. Gordon Shepherd, a professor of neuroscience at Northwestern University, heard about how some rodents have thumbnails and some have claws, and he decided to use the Field Museum’s collections to find a bigger pattern. 

“Before we did the research, we knew that some had nails, some had claws, and some had no thumbs at all. There were hints that the rodents that have thumbnails also use their thumbs to hold their food,” says Shepherd, one of the paper’s authors.

The research team set about examining the preserved skins of rodents in the Field’s collections, looking at the animals’ thumbs (or lack thereof). “There are more than 530 different genera of rodents, containing over 2,500 species. We looked at 433 of those genus groups from all across the rodent family tree,” says Anderson Feijó, the Field Museum’s curator of mammals and an author of the study.

The team found that of the genera they surveyed, 86% of them included species with thumbnails. They compared this information with data about the different rodents’ feeding habits. “We used the app iNaturalist to look at photos of different kinds of rodents eating, as well as textbooks and journal articles,” says Shepherd. “Using that information, we reconstructed the rodent family tree in terms of rodents that handle food with their hands versus ones that only use their mouths,” says Shepherd. 

The researchers found that rodents like guinea pigs that don’t have thumbs, let alone thumbnails, generally don’t handle food with their hands. The family tree that the researchers assembled also indicated that rodents with thumbnails go way back. The data suggest that all modern rodents descend from a common ancestor that had thumbnails too. This early rodent ancestor’s thumbnails may help explain how rodents took over the world. The researchers hypothesize that slim, flat thumbnails allow for more manual dexterity than long, sharp claws— thumbnails make it easier to handle and eat a nut.

“Rodents make up almost half of the mammal species on Earth, and they're found on every continent except Antarctica. Their thumbnails might help explain why rodents became so successful,” says Anderson Feijó. “Nuts are a very high-energy resource, but opening and eating them requires good manual dexterity that a lot of other animals don’t have— maybe rodents’ thumbnails allowed them to exploit this unique resource and then diversify broadly, because they were not competing with other animals for this food.” 

Animals’ nails or claws tell us about more than just how they handle their food, notes Missagia. “When I got involved with this project looking at rodents’ nails or claws, I immediately thought about their life modes— where they live, how they use their hands in ways beyond just eating,” says Missagia. “I knew that primates, which mostly have nails, are usually arboreal, they live in trees. We tested that correlation as well, and we found that rodents with nails also were likelier to live aboveground or in trees, while fossorial rodents, the ones that dig, were more likely to have claws and not nails on their thumbs.”

Aside from rodents, primates like humans are the only mammals that have evolved nails on their thumbs as opposed to claws. However, the two lineages appear to have evolved this feature on their own, in a process called convergent evolution.

This study, in addition to helping explain the evolution of rodents into the thousands of species that exist today, also underscores the value of museum collections.

“Museum collections are an endless source of discoveries,” says Anderson Feijó. “For all of the rodents that were used in this study, I bet none of the collectors would have imagined that someone someday would be studying those rodents’ thumbnails.”

This study was contributed to by Rafaela Missagia (University of São Paulo, Field Museum),  Anderson Feijó (Field Museum, Chinese Academy of Sciences), Lauren Johnson (Field Museum), Maximilian Allen (Illinois Natural History Survey, University of Illinois), Bruce D. Patterson (Field Museum), Paulina Jenkins (Natural History Museum, London), and Gordon Shepherd (Northwestern University).

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Journal

Science

DOI

10.1126/science.ads7926 

Subject of Research

Animals

Article Title

Evolution of thumbnails across Rodentia

Article Publication Date

4-Sep-2025

Rafaela Missagia examining a rodent's nails under a microscope at the Field Museum.

Gordon Shepherd and Anderson Feijó examining rodents in the Field Museum collections.



Anderson Feijó examining rodents in the collections of the Field Museum.

Credit
Field Museum



The thumbnail and hand of a kangaroo rat, an example of a rodent with thumbnails that uses its hands to manipulate its food.

Credit
Missagia et al



An Eastern gray squirrel eating acorns and using its hands to hold its food.

Credit

Wikimedia Commons user dkwikiedt https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Eastern_Grey_Squirrel_with_Acorns.jpg

 

The promise and tradeoffs of the 'drone revolution' in modern agriculture

Summary author: Walter Beckwith

American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)

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In a Policy Forum, Ben Belton and colleagues discuss the rapidly growing use of drone technology in agricultural applications and the important, yet understudied, benefits and trade-offs involved. “There are strong indications that drones can raise the efficiency and productivity of farming, improve worker safety, and enhance rural livelihoods, but these impacts have yet to be evaluated rigorously,” Belton et al. write. “Applied interdisciplinary research and corresponding policy responses are urgently needed to steer the global drone revolution in ways that make agriculture more sustainable.” Over the past decade, drones have become a profoundly transformative technology. Of their many uses, agriculture has emerged as one of the most significant and fastest-growing domains, particularly in Asia and Latin America. On farms worldwide, drones now undertake tasks ranging from sowing seeds and distributing fertilizers to monitoring crops, surveying livestock, and most prominently, spraying pesticides and other agrochemicals. As such, its thought that drones may help solve the challenge of producing more food with fewer resources. According to Belton et al. drones could enhance farming sustainability by boosting yields, reducing waste, and lowering chemical exposure, while also creating new opportunities for rural livelihoods—though risks of labor displacement, gender inequality, and chemical drift remain. To maximize benefits and manage these challenges, governments should support inclusive adoption through financing, training, and smart regulation. They should invest in research and infrastructure, say the authors, and establish safeguards on labor transitions, environmental safety, and data sovereignty, ensuring drones advance both sustainability and equity.

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Journal

Science

DOI

10.1126/science.ady1791 

Article Title

Can the global drone revolution make agriculture more sustainable?

Article Publication Date

4-Sep-2025

MSU study finds accessible wireless ultrasounds are accurate

Michigan State University

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Why this matters:

• A new MSU study found that wireless ultrasounds, compared to standard ultrasounds, provide accurate measurements of muscle size and muscle quality in female Division I athletes.

• Wireless ultrasounds can shorten the time needed to perform scans, are more cost-effective, and are easier to use in the field — making them especially valuable for sports medicine professionals monitoring athletes during a season.

• Although more research is needed, muscle assessments using wireless ultrasound are a reasonable alternative to standard ultrasound.

EAST LANSING, Mich. – Many student-athletes are preparing or returning to the field or court for their upcoming season. With the start of both collegiate and professional sports, injuries are inevitable — and when they do happen, getting fast, reliable results can make all the difference.

Researchers at Michigan State University found that wireless ultrasound devices, which are smaller and more portable compared to standard machines, can provide athletic trainers and other medical professionals with similar information. Not only do wireless ultrasounds deliver results faster and at lower cost, but they also enable imaging in field-based settings — like sidelines or dugouts — which is not possible with standard, cart-based machines.

The study, published in the Journal of Sport Rehabilitation, was led by first author Jessica Tolzman, a doctoral student, and senior author Matthew Harkey, an assistant professor, both of whom are based in the Department of Kinesiology and conduct research in the Athletic Injury and Rehabilitation Labs within MSU’s College of Education. The research team also included collaborators from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the University of Virginia and the Nike Sport Research Lab.

“We wanted to see if a more accessible, portable device could deliver the same quality of information as the larger machines we typically use in clinics and labs,” Harkey said. “If it holds up, that opens the door to faster, more flexible ways of assessing muscle health in real-world settings.”

Study background

Ultrasound imaging is a common, noninvasive tool to assess muscle characteristics. These images can be used to measure muscle size (either cross-sectional area or thickness) and muscle quality, which is often based on echo-intensity — a measure of how bright the muscle appears on the image.

The quadriceps are critical for knee stability, and assessing their size and quality is often used to monitor injury recovery and performance. Standard ultrasounds use panoramic imaging to capture the entire muscle, which requires large, expensive machines typically found in hospitals or labs.

Wireless ultrasounds are more affordable and easier to use in diverse locations, but they can only capture a single image at a time. This study set out to determine whether a single image from a wireless device could provide muscle measurements that aligned with those from a panoramic hospital-grade machine.

The study

The research team evaluated 29 female Division I athletes across soccer, volleyball and field hockey. Each athlete had her quadriceps scanned twice — once with a standard ultrasound machine and once with a handheld wireless device.

The standard ultrasound machine measured the entire quadriceps muscle area with panoramic images, while the wireless probe captured muscle thickness and quality from a single image. Researchers then compared the results from both types of devices.

Results and implications

The wireless handheld probes produced results that closely matched those from traditional hospital scanners when it came to measuring muscle size. This means the wireless devices can be a reliable tool for coaches, trainers and clinicians — even though they don’t provide full panoramic views.

Specifically, muscle thickness measured with the wireless probe showed a strong association with muscle size measured by the standard unit. Additionally, there was a moderate association between the two devices in how they measured muscle quality, based on image brightness.  

Because of their portability, wireless ultrasounds can be used on the sidelines, in athletic training rooms or during routine workouts — allowing for real-time monitoring without disrupting an athlete’s schedule.

While this study focused on the quadriceps in Division I female athletes, future research is needed to evaluate other muscles and broader populations.

Still, these findings show that wireless ultrasound can offer reliable insight into muscle characteristics — supporting faster, more flexible evaluations in sports and clinical settings.

“This study helps lay the groundwork for using wireless ultrasound more widely in sports medicine. We’re looking forward to seeing how it can support injury recovery and performance monitoring in the future,” Tolzman said.

Funding support included the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases and the Nike Sport Research Lab. A copy of the study is available via the National Library of Medicine.

By Madeline Strauss and Jack Harrison

Read on MSUToday.

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Michigan State University has been advancing the common good with uncommon will for 170 years. One of the world's leading public research universities, MSU pushes the boundaries of discovery to make a better, safer, healthier world for all while providing life-changing opportunities to a diverse and inclusive academic community through more than 400 programs of study in 17 degree-granting colleges.

For generations, Spartans have been changing the world through research. Federal funding helps power many of the discoveries that improve lives and keep America at the forefront of innovation and competitiveness. From lifesaving cancer treatments to solutions that advance technology, agriculture, energy and more, MSU researchers work every day to shape a better future for the people of Michigan and beyond. Learn more about MSU’s research impact powered by partnership with the federal government. 

For MSU news on the web, go to MSUToday or x.com/MSUnews.

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Journal

Journal of Sport Rehabilitation

DOI

10.1123/jsr.2024-0356 

Article Title

Assessment of Quadriceps Muscle Characteristics in Female Division I Athletes: A Validation Study of Wireless Probes Against Standard Ultrasound Units