What this corpus is built on

The ten papers here reference 424 distinct works between them, across 625 citation edges. Eighty-six of those works are cited by two or more of the ten, and twenty-five by four or more. Those twenty-five are the shared ancestors: the prior literature the corpus actually stands on, as opposed to the prior literature it happens to mention.

Counts below are of how many of the ten papers cite each work. Retrieved from OpenAlex; see data/citation-graph.json.

The review that frames the corpus

One work is cited by nine of ten: NLR receptors in plant immunity: making sense of the alphabet soup (2023, 10.15252/embr.202357495). No other reference comes close to that coverage, and it is a review rather than a result. The corpus is, in a real sense, a set of replies to it.

Structures that set the expectations

Four cryo-EM papers supply the architectural baseline that this corpus then complicates.

The 2019 pentamer and the three 2024 hexamers are the two sizes that guo-2026-ccg10-resistosome and toghani-2026-sni-undecamer then break. The 2024 papers are also the source of the resting-homodimer-to-hexamer model that makes activation-dependent effector binding interpretable at all (madhuprakash-2026-avrcap1b-tol9a).

Below them sit the effector-recognition structures at 4/10 each: the ZAR1 calcium channel (10.1016/j.cell.2021.05.003), the ROQ1 resistosome (10.1126/science.abd9993), the RPP1 holoenzyme (10.1126/science.abe3069), and the demonstration that helper receptors are calcium-permeable cation channels (10.1126/science.abg7917).

And at 5/10, the paper this corpus has the most direct quarrel with: A wheat resistosome defines common principles of immune receptor channels (2022, 10.1038/s41586-022-05231-w).

The network, and the motif

Two works supply the conceptual furniture rather than structures. NLR network mediates immunity to diverse plant pathogens (2017, 10.1073/pnas.1702041114, 6/10) is the founding description of the NRC network that four papers here work inside. An N-terminal motif in NLR immune receptors is functionally conserved across distantly related plant species (2019, 10.7554/eLife.49956, 7/10) defines the MADA motif, which appears in this corpus mostly as a tool — MADA mutations let receptors oligomerise without killing the cell, which is how most of the structures here were purified (seager-2026-avrcap1b-nrc3, toghani-2026-sni-undecamer).

RefPlantNLR (2021, 10.1371/journal.pbio.3001124, 8/10) is the reference collection every phylogenomic paper here classifies against (pai-2026-lettuce-nrc, marques-2026-legume-tissue).

Six anchors that are not intellectual ancestors

Six of the twenty-five most-shared works are software or reagents: AlphaFold 3 (5/10), MAFFT (5/10), FastTree (5/10), ChimeraX (4/10) and two Golden Gate cloning papers (6/10 and 5/10). They are flagged separately in the citation graph because a combined ranking would put a sequence aligner among the intellectual foundations of plant immunity.

Their presence is not trivial, though. That six of the deepest shared dependencies are methods is a fair description of what kind of field this is.

Citations within the corpus

Five edges run between the ten papers, all backwards in time and all from the two most recent preprints. toghani-2026-sensor-helper-interface cites guo-2026-ccg10-resistosome, seager-2026-avrcap1b-nrc3 and gomezdelacruz-2026-mla3-mimicry; toghani-2026-sni-undecamer cites ibrahim-2026-nrg1-chloroplast and seager-2026-avrcap1b-nrc3.

A sixth exists but is invisible to the index: madhuprakash-2026-avrcap1b-tol9a names seager-2026-avrcap1b-nrc3 as its companion study in the Discussion, and that edge is absent from the OpenAlex record. Coverage of very recent citations is incomplete, so the graph undercounts.

Nothing yet cites the two 2026 preprints that do most of the citing. Ask again next year.

All conceptual anchors

Methods and software