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When plants are invaded by pathogens, intracellular NLR immune receptors rapidly assemble into “resistosomes” to initiate defense responses. However, how resistosome activation drives cells toward cell death has long remained unclear. Dr. Chih-Hang Wu’s group at the Institute of Plant and Microbial Biology, Academia Sinica, employed high-resolution live-cell imaging to construct, for the first time, a spatiotemporal map of cell death following resistosome activation. The findings reveal that this process is a highly ordered cascade: it begins with a rapid influx of intracellular calcium ions, followed by disruption of organelle function and cytoskeletal disassembly, ultimately leading to nuclear shrinkage and vacuolar collapse, thereby completing the hypersensitive cell death response. This work establishes a mechanistic framework for the execution phase of plant immune cell death, demonstrating how resistosomes coordinate multiple structural changes across space and time to convert immune signals into an irreversible cellular fate.

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.