Turns out I am not the only person to be wondering this!
MSU Foundation Professor Brad Day studies the mechanisms by which plants fend off pathogens
www.canr.msu.edu
It says:
“We have identified several mechanisms in plant immunity that have known functions in human diseases,” he said. “We can use plants as a model to understand how these mechanisms function and how they've evolved. In doing that with plants, we can not only understand immunity, but we can also understand mechanisms that reach out into other neurological diseases. For example, a plant can tell us how the mechanism of Alzheimer’s may function, even though plants don't have neurosystems, some of those basic underlying chemical mechanisms are shared.”
Day said plants also provide somewhat surprising opportunities to learn more about human immunity.
“I think plants offer both technical and resource advantages that are sometimes obstacles in human research,” Day said. “For example, we can knock out many multiples of combinations of genes and study their function in plants.”
“No longer are the days when we think we can knock out a single gene, and that is the magic bullet that underpins a disease. Diseases in humans are complex and are controlled by many genes and developmental states. In plants we can knock out multiple genes and expose plants to multiple environments to understand how those genes interact as a network in response to multiple stresses.
I get the impression that this hasn't been looked at very much, and that things aren't very far forward, but the idea that you can experiment on plants in a way that wouldn't be ethical or possible in animals is interesting.
