James Smith

It's going to be very difficult to rule that out.

But the...

Many of the world's best immunologists have looked into this and have been unable to rule out this scenario where it causes harm to humans.

These are people like Ruslan Medzitov, who discovered the fact that the adaptive immune system depends on activation of the innate immune system.

Mark Davis, who discovered T-cell receptors.

David Relman.

Wow.

Yeah, David Relman, who was the first person to characterize the human microbiome.

Wow.

Huge names in the field have looked into this and decided to co-author this paper calling attention to the risks, and they haven't been able to find a knockdown argument for why we shouldn't be concerned.

Yeah, plant immune systems are actually conceptually quite similar to animal ones.

They don't have adaptive immunity, but they have innate immunity, similar to insects.

And that innate immunity similarly has these pattern recognition receptors that detect common patterns on bacteria.

So to give a specific example, plant leaves have little holes in them called stomata.

Mm-hmm.

The leaf surface has these pattern recognition receptors that will bind to common patterns on bacteria.

When they do that, the stomata will close up in something called stomatal defense to stop the bacteria from being able to get into the leaf.

That probably wouldn't work as well with a myrobacterial infection.

And so the bacteria might be able to enter the leaf through the stomata.

Once it's inside the leaf, you have this space in between cells called the apoplast.