Plant Responses To Eliminate Critical Threats is an international training program that focuses on plant-microbe interactions jointly funded by NSERC-CREATE and DFG-IRTG. It involves 8 research groups from the Georg-August-University Göttingen in Germany and 9 research groups from the University of British Columbia in Canada. PRoTECT is designed to attract the best undergraduate, graduate, and post-doctoral trainees, and foster collaborative, multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary research. The incorporation of a new custom introductory course, international rotations and exchanges, close interactions and cooperation with industrial partners, weekly seminars, research symposia, methodology workshops and excursions/field trips/outreach activities will promote increased mobility and produce a new generation of highly capable and knowledgeable scientists who will be able to integrate modern research tools and environmentally friendly crop protection strategies against pathogenic threats to help solve one of the most urgent problems of our time: feeding the increasing global population in a sustainable manner.