Back

Brachypodium antifreeze protein gene products inhibit ice recrystallization, attenuate ice nucleation, and reduce immune response

Juurakko, C. L.; diCenzo, G. C.; Walker, V. K.

2022-02-20 plant biology
10.1101/2022.02.18.480559 bioRxiv
Show abstract

Antifreeze proteins (AFPs) from the model crop, Brachypodium distachyon, allow freeze survival and attenuate pathogen-mediated ice nucleation. Intriguingly, each Brachypodium AFP gene encodes two proteins, an autonomous AFP and a leucine-rich repeat (LRR). We present structural models suggesting that ice-binding motifs on the ~13 kDa AFPs can "spoil" nucleating arrays on the ~120 kDa bacterial ice nucleating proteins that form ice at high sub-zero temperatures, consistent with decreases in ice nucleating activity by lysates from wildtype compared to transgenic Brachypodium lines. Strikingly, the expression of Brachypodium LRRs in transgenic Arabidopsis inhibited an immune response to pathogen flagella peptides (flg22), with structural modelling suggesting this was due to affinity of the LRR domains to flg22. Thus, these genes play distinctive roles in connecting freeze survival and anti-pathogenic systems via their encoded proteins ability to adsorb to ice as well as attenuating bacterial ice nucleation and the host immune response.

Matching journals

The top 4 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

50% of probability mass above

"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.