A transmembrane protein confers the Yr26/Yr24/YrCH42/YrG22

Abstract Stripe or yellow rust (YR), caused by Puccinia striiformis Westend. f. sp. tritici (Pst), is a devastating fungal disease of wheat. Here, we report the map-based cloning of Yr26 (synonyms: Yr24, YrCH42, and YrG22), a major stripe rust resistance gene, and its validation by gene silencing, mutation analysis and transgenic complementation. Yr26, which firstly arises in emmer wheat and recently has introgressed into bread wheat, is a newly evolved gene encoding a transmembrane protein. AlphaFold v3.0 predictes a C-terminal four-helical bundle domain that is critical for triggering Ca2+-dependent cell death, a hallmark of the hypersensitive response. The cloning of Yr26 offers not only a genetic resource for pyramiding stripe rust resistance genes in wheat breeding but also an opportunity to study host–pathogen co-evolution. Acknowledgements The authors thank all members of the plant immunity research team in the State Key Laboratory of Crop Stress Resistance and High-Efficiency Production at Northwest A&F University for helpful comments. We are grateful to Prof. R.A. McIntosh, Plant Breeding Institute, University of Sydney, for language editing and proofreading of the draft manuscript; Drs. Jian Ma, Jun Li, Hongqing Ling, Xiaojun Nie, Meng Wang and Lin Huang for providing tetraploid wheat accessions; Drs. Zhiyong Liu, Jian Chen, and Yajun Wang for helpful suggestions and discussion; Drs. Xueling Huang for assistance with genetic transformation and KASP genotyping; Hua Zhao for assistance with confocal microscopy; Ms Haiying Wang for construction of a genomic DNA library; and Dr. Guohao Han for assistance with the provision of the pCAMBIA1305-GFP vector. Funding Research work conducted in China was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 32293240, 32372562, 32302377, 32272088), Key R&D Program of Shaanxi (2024NC2-GJHX-36), and China Agriculture Research System (CARS-3). Research work on Yr24 cloning was supported by the Australian Research Council (Project DE170100151). Author information Authors and Affiliations Corresponding authors Ethics declarations Competing interests The authors declare no competing interests. Additional information Publisher’s note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Supplementary information Source data Rights and permissions Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. About this article Cite this article Liu, S., Mu, K., Yang, S. et al. A transmembrane protein confers the Yr26/Yr24/YrCH42/YrG22-mediated stripe rust resistance in wheat. Nat Commun (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-76091-5 Received: Accepted: Published: DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-76091-5