Postdoctoral scientist in the Zipfel lab at UZH 👩🏻🔬🌾🪴🧬🧫
Diana Gómez De La Cruz
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📣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
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!
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. ✨
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.🤩
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 💥💪
Briefly, we found that the barley immune receptor MLA3 confers resistance to the blast fungus by setting a cheeky trap! It poses as a pathogen effector host target by mimicking its binding interface to trip the wire and activate immunity.
x.com/dianagdlc/st...
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/...
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 🧵👇
As an emerging leader in plant innate immunity, we're thrilled to present Mauricio Contreras with a 2027 Early Career Research Award! Alongside advocating for Open Science and preprint review, Mauricio's "activation-and-release" and "NLR resurrection" models are already referenced worldwide.
Excited to attend my 1st ISMPMI conference, and present our work on a paired wheat CNL/MLKL receptor mechanism! 🌾
Come chat to me at my poster on Tuesday, P-050! 📜
If you miss my poster session, I will be talking in: Crop resistance genetics and genomics on Wednesday - 16:25-16:35!
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...
