This is wild: HMA domain proteins binding a MAX effector to activate NLR-mediated immunity through cNMP signaling molecules.

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Tuning Yeast Glycosylation Proximal to the FLS2-flg22 Binding Interface enables Functional Yeast Surface Display under Induced ER Stress Pattern recognition receptors such as FLAGELLIN SENSING 2 (FLS2) are central to plant immunity and attractive targets for engineering broader detection of bacterial phytopathogens. However, evaluating...

Optimized glycosylation patterns to recapitulate arabidopsis FLS2-flagellin binding in yeast surface display 👏 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Save the american chestnut 🌰

Plant synthetic biology faculty opening – come be my colleague! 🌱🧬

@universityofga.bsky.social Department of Plant Biology is hiring a tenure-track Assistant Professor in Plant Synthetic Biology for Strategic Resources Research. Join UGA's growing plant synbio community!

Engineered geminivirus replicons enable rapid in planta directed evolution Directed evolution can rapidly generate genetic variants with new and enhanced properties, yet efficient platforms for performing such evolution directly in plant cells have been lacking. We developed...

Reading this 👀 new tool for in vivo plant protein selection www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Thank you Jongmin :)

And my awesome long-term collaborator in science and life
@jimnotwell.bsky.social

Friends who shared their job search experience with me, @claudiaraudia.bsky.social, Flor, Lay Teng, Kyle, Berfin

Ronald lab folks for endless support, feedback, and tolerating my play-by-play

My mentors for their feedback on talks and kind encouragement, @gittacoaker.bsky.social Dinesh, Valley, and Richard

Academic job search takes a village. I'd like to thank mine - my postdoc mentor @pcronald.bsky.social and PhD mentor Roel for all their wisdom and support throughout the years

Harnessing synthetic biology to engineer resilient crops

Really excited to join Stanford ChemE this September! We'll engineer proteins in plant immune and hormone pathways, combining high-throughput directed evolution with ML. Our goal is to enhance climate stress resilience and disease resistance in crops: rim.stanford.edu

Found last season's EquiSciTrack series helpful for the job search!

Sorry this happened. Wow…

Congratulations Susanna!

Studying wild varieties resistant to HLB led to a peptide solution to HLB in cultivated citrus. Peptide that blocks a susceptibility gene. Down the road hopefully this gene can be CRISPR edited to its DN form and save the oranges

Studying wild resistant varieties -> basic biology -> a solution to a devastating disease in citrus. Pretty amazing

So exciting!!! Congratulations Mari 🥳🥳

Wheat tandem kinase RWT4 directly binds a fungal effector to activate defense - Nature Genetics This study shows that RWT4, a wheat tandem kinase, confers resistance to the fungal pathogen Magnaporthe oryzae by directly binding to the pathogen effector AvrPWT4 and activating host defense.

🌱From Nature Genetics: RWT4, a wheat tandem kinase protein, directly binds and phosphorylates a fungal effector to trigger defense - highlighting TKPs as effector sensors. (Yi-Chang Sung, Suji Baik, Gitta Coaker)
▶️ www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Toddler and i enjoy the same book somehow

Agreed, and editing-based disease resistance solutions that are head and shoulders above current options are one way forward

Three reasons for "almost no commercially available plant varieties carrying biotech-derived disease resistance traits" according to authors: 1. Disease resistance and the defense response are complicated 2. Plant breeders are good at their jobs 3. Disease resistance is a constantly moving target

It‘s Complicated: Why Are There So Few Commercially Successful Crop Varieties Engineered for Disease Resistance? It is more than 40 years since the era of transgenic plants began and more than 30 years after the cloning of the first plant disease resistance genes. Despite extensive progress in our mechanistic u....

I've also been thinking about this: "Why Are There So Few Commercially Successful Crop Varieties Engineered for Disease Resistance?"
bsppjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

If you are a #WNT lover (who is not?) you cannot miss the incoming Grodon Research Conference
www.grc.org/wnt-signalin...
and the preceeding GRSeminar
www.grc.org/wnt-signalin...
a unique forum for younger scientists to present their work

👉 Please help me spread the word and RT (or RB?)!🙏

Wow excited to read!

Thank you for representing ag researchers at the rally and sharing these thoughts - also wondering the same!

Video Former USDA employee terminated days before her due date Justine Beaulieu was impacted by the Trump layoffs days before she was due to give birth, losing her maternity leave and her health insurance in limbo.

Former USDA employee (and a UC Davis colleague) terminated days before her due date: "We wouldn't have food without our farmers. A lot of us working for the USDA, that's what we do, we support American farmers"
abcnews.go.com/Politics/vid...

Pam Ronald smiling

We're celebrating our 10th anniversary this year and remembering some great moments from the past decade! In February 2022, IGI's Pam Ronald won the Wolf Prize in Agriculture for her “pioneering work on disease resistance and environmental stress tolerance in rice.”

Read more: ow.ly/kAqe50UPW9s

A tour de force starting with C. elegans juice that identified a nematode peptide MAMP-plant immune receptor pair

Check out Fig 4 where we apply this model to a human enzyme :)