Plant Biology

Effector target-guided engineering of an integrated domain expands the disease resistance profile of a rice NLR immune receptor

1. Josephine HR Maidment
2. Motoki Shimizu
3. Adam R Bentham
4. Sham Vera
5. Marina Franceschetti
6. Apinya Longya
7. Clare EM Stevenson
8. Juan Carlos De la Concepcion
9. Aleksandra Białas
10. Sophien Kamoun
11. Ryohei Terauchi
12. Mark J Banfield

• Curated by eLife

  Evaluation Summary:

  Engineering NLR proteins to improve disease resistance in crop plants is a major goal of the field. This study applies knowledge from structural and evolutionary studies of the rice NLR protein Pik-1 and cognate effector protein AVR-Pik to engineering of new disease resistance genes. The authors nicely demonstrate that it is indeed possible to engineer resistance proteins with broad recognition specificity for the rice blast fungus. The work is of interest to colleagues in synthetic biology, protein engineering and plant-pathogen interactions.

  (This preprint has been reviewed by eLife. We include the public reviews from the reviewers here; the authors also receive private feedback with suggested changes to the manuscript. Reviewer #1 and Reviewer #2 agreed to share their name with the authors.)

Reviewed by eLife

Evolutionary gain and loss of a plant pattern-recognition receptor for HAMP recognition

1. Simon Snoeck
2. Bradley W Abramson
3. Anthony GK Garcia
4. Ashley N Egan
5. Todd P Michael
6. Adam D Steinbrenner

• Curated by eLife

  Evaluation Summary:

  This manuscript, of interest to those studying the evolution of immunity, investigates the evolutionary history of a recently described herbivore-associated molecular pattern (HAMP) receptor, INR, which perceives the caterpillar-derived peptide HAMP, In11. The authors compare INR homologs to identify evolutionarily conserved residues and use chimeric fusion proteins to investigate specificity. The findings presented are valuable and supported by convincing experiments and analysis.

  (This preprint has been reviewed by eLife. We include the public reviews from the reviewers here; the authors also receive private feedback with suggested changes to the manuscript. Reviewer #1 agreed to share their name with the authors.)

Reviewed by eLife

RPG acts as a central determinant for infectosome formation and cellular polarization during intracellular rhizobial infections

1. Beatrice Lace
2. Chao Su
3. Daniel Invernot Perez
4. Marta Rodriguez-Franco
5. Tatiana Vernié
6. Morgane Batzenschlager
7. Sabrina Egli
8. Cheng-Wu Liu
9. Thomas Ott

• Curated by eLife

  eLife assessment

  This work, which will be of interest to all who study plant-microbe interactions as well as plant cell biology, addresses a fundamental question in symbiosis, placing a classic nodulation defective mutant (rpg) into a plausible protein complex and establishing a hierarchy of "infectosome" assembly. Evidence includes convincing genetics and subcellular localization of components during establishment and maintenance of infection. The study also includes compelling new FLIM-based imaging techniques to distinguish signals from closely associated domains in plant cells.

Reviewed by eLife

Unbiased proteomic and forward genetic screens reveal that mechanosensitive ion channel MSL10 functions at ER–plasma membrane contact sites in Arabidopsis thaliana

1. Jennette M Codjoe
2. Ryan A Richardson
3. Fionn McLoughlin
4. Richard David Vierstra
5. Elizabeth S Haswell

• Curated by eLife

  Evaluation Summary:

  The study is of interest to researchers in the field of cell biology, especially mechanosensing. The work identifies a new context to evaluate the activity of MSL proteins in mechanosensing by identifying two novel suppressors of MSL10 as components of the ER-PM contact sites (EPCS). The work has significance for both the plant and the animal science community providing the basics for various avenues of further research in the area of mechanobiology.

  (This preprint has been reviewed by eLife. We include the public reviews from the reviewers here; the authors also receive private feedback with suggested changes to the manuscript. Reviewer #1 and Reviewer #2 agreed to share their name with the authors.)

Reviewed by eLife

A role for brassinosteroid signalling in decision-making processes in the Arabidopsis seedling

1. Nils Kalbfuß
2. Alexander Strohmayr
3. Marcel Kegel
4. Lien Le
5. Friederike Grosse-Holz
6. Barbara Brunschweiger
7. Katharina Stöckl
8. Christian Wiese
9. Carina Franke
10. Caroline Schiestl
11. Sophia Prem
12. Shuyao Sha
13. Katrin Franz-Oberdorf
14. Juliane Hafermann
15. Marc Thiemé
16. Eva Facher
17. Wojciech Palubicki
18. Cordelia Bolle
19. Farhah F. Assaad

Reviewed by Review Commons

Diversity of funnel plasmodesmata in angiosperms: the impact of geometry on plasmodesmal resistance

1. Grayson P. Ostermeyer
2. Kaare H. Jensen
3. Aslak R. Franzen
4. Winfried S. Peters
5. Michael Knoblauch

• Curated by eLife

  Evaluation Summary:

  The authors make an important contribution to our understanding of the universal mechanism of unloading of sugars from the phloem (the vascular tissue dedicated to long-distance sugar transport in plants) into root tip cells. Specifically, the authors investigate the pores (called plasmodesmata) present in the cell wall separating phloem cells from those cells into which sugars get unloaded in roots, which they found to have the same characteristic structure in all plant species investigated. The physical properties of these particular plasmodesmata suggest that they are especially suited for efficient and selective phloem unloading. The paper is relevant for audiences studying plant physiology and development. There are a few criticisms of the modelling work.

  (This preprint has been reviewed by eLife. We include the public reviews from the reviewers here; the authors also receive private feedback with suggested changes to the manuscript. Reviewer #1 agreed to share their name with the authors.)

Reviewed by eLife

Shuffled ATG8 interacting motifs form an ancestral bridge between UFMylation and autophagy

1. Lorenzo Picchianti
2. Víctor Sánchez de Medina Hernández
3. Ni Zhan
4. Nicholas AT Irwin
5. Roan Groh
6. Madlen Stephani
7. Harald Hornegger
8. Rebecca Beveridge
9. Justyna Sawa‐Makarska
10. Thomas Lendl
11. Nenad Grujic
12. Christin Naumann
13. Sascha Martens
14. Thomas A Richards
15. Tim Clausen
16. Silvia Ramundo
17. G Elif Karagöz
18. Yasin Dagdas

Reviewed by Review Commons

Chemical screen of Arabidopsis zygote and proteomics in tobacco BY-2 cells identify general plant cell division inhibitors

1. Yusuke Kimata
2. Moé Yamada
3. Takashi Murata
4. Keiko Kuwata
5. Ayato Sato
6. Takamasa Suzuki
7. Daisuke Kurihara
8. Mitsuyasu Hasebe
9. Tetsuya Higashiyama
10. Minako Ueda

Reviewed by Review Commons

Impact of energy limitations on function and resilience in long-wavelength Photosystem II

1. Stefania Viola
2. William Roseby
3. Stefano Santabarbara
4. Dennis Nürnberg
5. Ricardo Assunção
6. Holger Dau
7. Julien Sellés
8. Alain Boussac
9. Andrea Fantuzzi
10. A William Rutherford

• Curated by eLife

  Evaluation Summary:

  The work describes the energetic constraints and preferred operating conditions of these "strategies" in particular on how nature has solved the problem of low energy "headroom'" required to prevent deleterious back reactions while maintaining efficient energy storage. The differences between the species are quite interesting and show that nature has evolved multiple solutions to fundamental limitations. Given the importance of understanding and improving the efficiency of photosynthesis, and the new insights revealed, the work will be of interest to a broad audience.

  (This preprint has been reviewed by eLife. We include the public reviews from the reviewers here; the authors also receive private feedback with suggested changes to the manuscript. Reviewer #1 and Reviewer #2 agreed to share their names with the authors.)

Reviewed by eLife

Predicting plant biomass accumulation from image-derived parameters

1. Dijun Chen
2. Rongli Shi
3. Jean-Michel Pape
4. Kerstin Neumann
5. Daniel Arend
6. Andreas Graner
7. Ming Chen
8. Christian Klukas

Reviewed by GigaScience