Disease resistance is currently an area of interest to many groups because the tools are finally available to answer long-standing questions on the molecular basis of specificity and the evolution of new resistance specificities in plants. Many of the resistance genes cloned to date share sequence similarities. With the publication of the Arabidopsis sequence, it was possible to estimate how many such genes there were in the genome and analyze their diversity as well as possible mechanisms generating some of this diversity. Our paper provided a global overview of the most prevalent class of resistance gene candidates and was therefore a reference for others working on individual genes as well as providing a model for the analysis of large gene families.

Our paper predominantly used computational approaches to dissect this large family of genes and analyze their genomic distribution relative to segmental duplications. We developed several custom scripts that we made freely available and that have been used by others to analyze other large gene families. We also showed that approximately a third of the genes had minor misannotations, which provides a caution concerning the use of automated annotations.

Our paper contributes to the understanding of the genetic architecture of resistance genes in plants and the diversity of the most prevalent class of resistance gene. It showed that at least 0.5% of all transcripts in Arabidopsis are potentially devoted to recognizing pathogens.

I have been studying disease resistance since my graduate work in the 1970s. I have pursued this area of research because of the intrinsic intellectual challenges in understanding how a potential pathogen interacts with its host as well as the applied implications for developing plants with enhanced resistance.