Tag: Plant Immunity

Salicylic acid (SA) is best known as a central hormone orchestrating plant immune response, including the hypersensitive reaction and systemic acquired resistance. Beyond defense, SA also influences plant growth and development, highlighting a delicate role in balancing the trade-off between immunity…

When drought strikes, plants struggle to survive. Growth slows, flowers appear too early, fruits drop prematurely, and harvests shrink. Scientists have long tried to engineer drought tolerance plants, but boosting this often comes with a hidden cost: stunted growth even when water is plentiful. This…

Grapevine is an important crop in the food industry. Like other crops, cultivated grapevine benefits from wild relatives that can be used for genetic resource mining and cultivar improvement. Useful genetic resources include novel alleles and gene expression regulators for better growth and stress resilience.…

Receptor-like kinases (RLKs) are abundant genes that have diversified and expanded throughout plant evolution, with most plants having hundreds or more RLKs. In this exciting new paper, Ngou et al. decided to deconstruct the recognition sites of these proteins in order to be able to make predictions…

Plants may not have white blood cells, but they are far from defenseless. Instead, they rely on specialized immune receptors called NLRs (nucleotide-binding leucine-rich repeat receptors) to recognize intracellular invaders and trigger strong defense responses. These receptors are molecular shape-shifters,…

How do plants protect themselves from microbial invaders? One response is the closure of plasmodesmata to stop the spread of microbial effector proteins that help pathogens evade the immune response, protecting neighboring uninfected cells. While the phenomenon of plasmodesmata closure in response of…

Single cell mutiomics are radically changing our understanding of pretty much every cellular process. Here, Nobori et al. integrated single-cell transcriptomic, epigenomic and spatial transcriptomic data to investigate plant responses to pathogens. The authors used three different strains of Pseudomonas…

Plant resistance genes encode proteins that trigger immune responses when they recognize pathogen effectors. Their activation must be carefully regulated, as overexpression of activation of R genes usually causes a decrease in growth rate. Here, Sun et al. investigated the role of alternative splicing…