The Regulatory Army of Plant Defense: Transcription Factors in the War for Plant Immunity

Abstract

Plant diseases impose major constraints on global crop productivity and pose a major threat to food security. Here, we review transcription factors (TFs) as central orchestrators of plant defense, consolidating recent advances in how these regulators connect pathogen perception to immune signaling, transcriptional reprogramming, and durable defense responses. Initially, we combined a literature-based synthesis with a natural language processing (NLP) analysis of 1647 PubMed abstracts published between 2021 and 2026 to map dominant and underexplored TF families associated with plant immunity. WRKY, MYB, AP2/ERF, bHLH/MYC, and NAC dominated the recent literature, whereas families such as NF-Y, Trihelix, PLATZ, TCP, and GRAS represent emerging regulatory actors. Across these and other families, TFs integrate pattern- and effector-triggered immunity, hormone crosstalk, chromatin dynamics, non-coding RNA regulation, post-translational modifications, and metabolic remodeling, in addition to cell-type-specific expression. Further evidence indicates that pathogens frequently manipulate TFs to weaken host defense, underscoring their central position in plant molecular physiology and plant-pathogen coevolution. The data emphasize that TF function is context-dependent and influenced by multilayered regulation, cell type, pathogen lifestyle, and host genetic background. This review provides a framework for understanding TFs in plant immune control and highlights TF-centered strategies for engineering durable crop resistance, along with future challenges.