Long non-coding RNA: A secret weapon in the plant-pathogen war

Over millions of years, plants and pathogens have been engaged in an evolutionary war. As plants adopt new defense systems to protect themselves, pathogens evolve strategies to fight back. A well-characterized pathogen strategy is to secrete effectors that target plant defenses. Although protein effectors are well known, it was unclear whether non-protein effectors are a part of this host-pathogen interaction. In a recent study, He et al. demonstrated the direct physical involvement of Magnaporthe oryzae long non-coding RNAs (lncRNA) as effectors in rice blast disease. lncRNAs often function by direct base-pairing with targeted microRNAs (miRNAs) in a process known as sponging, which prevents the miRNAs from carrying out their functions. The authors identified a fungal lncRNA, lnc117761, as highly expressed during pathogen infection. Deletion, mutation, complementation and ORF disruption studies demonstrated that lnc117761 enhances pathogenicity. The authors showed that lnc117761 targets a plant microRNA, miR5827, which itself targets the mRNA of PKR1, which suppresses disease resistance. By targeting miR5827, lnc11761 also suppresses disease resistance. Genome sequence alignment detected similar miR5827–lnc117761 binding sites in other plant and microbial species, suggesting that this region could be a conserved regulatory DNA motif. The authors functionally validated this in the R. solani-rice sheath blight and Fusarium graminearum– wheat head blight disease systems. They further verified a synthetic miRNA mimic as a potential biological tool for crop protection. This newly identified pathway can become an effective route for future crop breeding. (Summary by Kavita Joshi @JoshiKvita) Nature 10.1038/s41586-026-10572-x