Postdoctoral scientist in the Zipfel lab at UZH 👩🏻🔬🌾🪴🧬🧫
Diana Gómez De La Cruz
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So proud to see this story finally out!🎉 We added new data since our previous preprint—transgenic barley plants with an engineered immune receptor that fights off two fungal pathogens at once. Short 🧵 and link to the original preprint thread on X👇
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
Plants and animals respond to pathogen attack by mounting innate immune responses that require intracellular nucleotide-binding leucine-rich repeat (NLR) proteins. These immune receptors detect pathog...
Check out our latest work! AlphaFold 3 revealed a transient immune receptor complex that eluded biochemical studies for almost a decade 🤯 We describe a conserved structural logic underlying sensor–helper communication in an NLR immune receptor network 🧵👇
Diana Gómez De La Cruz
And that's a wrap-up from my story at @thesainsburylab.bsky.social. After amazing 8 years working at TSL in Norwich, I've now joined the Zipfel lab at the University of Zurich in beautiful🇨🇭 to switch gears and work on plant peptides and extracellular immune receptors. Exciting times!
If one molecular trap is good, why not two? We engineered the rye immune receptor SR50 to carry the same disguise as MLA3. The result: an immune receptor that recognises effectors from two completely different fungal pathogens — stem rust AND blast 💥💪
And it actually works in plants 🌾. Transgenic barley expressing our engineered SR50 is resistant to both stem rust and blast — two fungal diseases of economic importance in cereal crops. Two threats, one receptor.🤩
📣NEW DISCOVERY: Plant immune receptors can evolve by mimicking effector targets & that insight enables us to engineer a disease-resistance gene that can recognise two major crop pathogens 🌾
www.tsl.ac.uk/news/plants-...
@dianagdlc.bsky.social @talbotlabtsl.bsky.social @johninnescentre.bsky.social
A big big thank you to all who made it possible: Tom Ingram, Raf Zdrzałek, @mjbanfield.bsky.social, the incredible tissue culture team at @thesainsburylab.bsky.social and my supervisors @matthewmoscou.bsky.social and @talbotlabtsl.bsky.social. What a team, what a ride. ✨
