An atypical kinase under balancing selection confers broad-spectrum disease resistance in Arabidopsis

During the evolution of plant-pathogen interactions, plants have evolved the capability to defend themselves from pathogen infection by different overlapping mechanisms. Disease resistance is constituted by an elaborate, multilayered system of defense. Among these responses, quantitative resistance is a prevalent form of resistance in crops and natural plant populations, for which the genetic and molecular bases remain largely unknown.Thus, identification of the genes underlying quantitative resistance constitutes a major challenge in plant breeding and evolutionary biology, and might have enormous practical implications for human health by increasing crop yield and quality.