Back

Direct binding of a fungal effector by the wheat RWT4 tandem kinase activates defense

Sung, Y.-C.; Li, Y.; Bernasconi, Z.; Baik, S.; Asuke, S.; Keller, B.; Fahima, T.; Coaker, G.

2024-08-31 plant biology
10.1101/2024.04.30.591956 bioRxiv
Show abstract

Plants have intricate innate immune receptors that detect pathogens. Research has intensely focused on two receptor classes recognizing external and internal threats. Recent research has identified a class of disease resistance proteins called tandem kinase proteins (TKPs). We investigated RWT4, a wheat TKP that confers resistance to the devastating fungal pathogen Magnaporthe oryzae. We established a rice protoplast system, revealing RWT4 specifically recognizes the AvrPWT4 effector, leading to the transcription of defense genes and inducing cell death. RWT4 possesses both kinase and pseudokinase domains, with its kinase activity essential for defense. RWT4 directly interacts with and transphosphorylates AvrPWT4. Biolayer interferometry revealed both RWT4 kinase and pseudokinase regions bind the effector. Sequence similarity and structural modeling revealed an integrated partial kinase duplication in RWT4s kinase region as critical for effector interaction and defense activation. Collectively, these findings demonstrate that TKPs can directly bind a recognized effector, leading to downstream defense activation.

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.