A detailed thread soon, but first, thanks to all my great colleagues and friends in @soreklab.bsky.social, the Schulze-Lefert lab, and @parkergroup.bsky.social (@mpipz.bsky.social) for their support and many fruitful discussions.
How do pathogens disarm plant immunity?
We discovered a widespread strategy used by plant bacterial pathogens: they directly cleave a conserved immune signaling molecule produced by plant immune receptors.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
How do human cells defend against viruses?
@sgfern.bsky.social discovers that human immune proteins named ISGs target ancient features of replication shared between animal and bacterial viruses – opening analysis of human immunity to the power of bacterial genetics
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
TIRs are key regulators of plant immunity, but the role of conserved TIR-only proteins has remained unclear.
Here, we compare TIR-only proteins from Arabidopsis and barley and show that they share a conserved role in plant immunity.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
Our aRES story is finally out 😀
Beyond what was reported in the preprint, we found that aRES is activated by direct binding of the phage DNA polymerase.
Another NAD-degrading defense system — and multiple phage strategies to overcome it.
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Special thanks to my co-authors Talya and @amitaig.bsky.social for contributing to the phage experiments and biochemistry, and to Aaron, @federicalocci.bsky.social, Silvina, and Elke in MPIPZ who helped with plant experiments and made my trips to Cologne both productive and enjoyable.
Excited to see our work out in @natmicrobiol.nature.com! We uncovered broad functional diversity within phage sponge families🧽.
Huge thanks to all coauthors and brilliant collaborators @kranzuschlab.bsky.social @reneechang.bsky.social !
www.nature.com/articles/s41...