A recent study by a group of scientists identified similar disease fighting mechanism in plants and animals even after a billion years of evolution, thus heralding a new era in plant and animal immunization.

Scientists in this research have discovered the disease fighting and immunity receptors in both animals and plants. Receptors are nothing but protein molecules which sends signals to the brain to activate immune defense. “Increasingly, researchers will be intent on harnessing knowledge of host sensors to advance plant and animal health," said Ronald,

"Some of the resistance mechanisms that researchers will discover will likely serve as new drug targets to control deadly bacteria for which there are currently no effective treatments," she said.

This 15 year –long research finding, published in the latest issue of the journal Science, offers a clear view on how the immunity mechanism have developed down the years in plants and animals.

Though this study has offered valuable insight into the disease-resistance mechanisms in plants and animals, scientists believe that further study is needed to ascertain why some plants and animals depend on one immunity receptor to fight a disease while others use receptor combinations for this task.

"If you think of evolution as a tree and existing plant and animal species as the leaves on the tips of the tree's branches, it is clear that we have examined only a few of those leaves and have only a fragmentary impression of what immune mechanisms exist now and were present in the distant past," said Bruce Beutler.

The study of plant and animal immunology gained pace after the discovery of the first plant and animal receptor. The first plant receptor was discovered in the year 1995 by Pamela Ronald, a UC Davis plant pathologist and the first animal receptor was three years later by Bruce Beutler, an immunologist and mammalian geneticist at The Scripps Research Institute.