Question: how will this benefit plants specifically?

Steven Kiddle answered on 14 Jun 2010:

By understanding which genes a plant is using to protect itself against a disease, we can treat the plant in ways that make it use the gene less or more, which can make the plant resistant to the disease. This means that they will get better faster than before and survive the disease. Plant diseases are a huge problem, damaging crops, losing farmers money and in extreme cases causing starvation.