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Pathogen cell wall degrading enzymes facilitate extracellular vesicles to deliver RNA into plants

Oberkofler, L.; Tisserant, C.; Krueger, C.; Rodriguez-Rendon, M.; Seydel, C.; Cheradil, A.; Safari, N.; Biabani, A.; Cheng, A.-P.; Ostendorp, S.; Klingl, A.; Kehr, J.; Robatzek, S.; Weiberg, A.

2026-08-07 plant biology
10.64898/2026.08.07.743426 bioRxiv
Show abstract

Extracellular vesicles (EVs) can deliver RNA and proteins into host cells to manipulate immunity; but how EVs transverse the cell wall is unknown. Using the fungal pathogen Botrytis cinerea that induces cross-kingdom RNA interference in plants, we uncovered that EV-mediated RNA delivery was dependent on cell wall degrading enzymes. Through fluorescence and transmission electron microscopy, and molecular genetic techniques, we demonstrate that EV-associated proteins compromise the plant cell wall, thereby facilitating RNA delivery. Notably, cell wall degrading enzymes are commonly associated with EVs across plant-colonizing bacterial, fungal and oomycete species, indicating a conserved role in EV transport across cell walls. These findings uncover a formerly unknown mechanism by which cell wall degrading enzymes facilitate EVs to transverse the cell wall for cargo delivery in cross-kingdom communication.

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"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.