A sunflower FLS2 guides reconstruction of recognition of a Xanthomonas flg22 escape variant across divergent FLS2 receptors
Zhong, L.; Wu, L.; Cheng, Q.
Show abstract
FLS2-mediated perception of the bacterial flagellin epitope flg22 is frequently compromised by pathogen sequence variation, and Val14-containing Xanthomonas flg22 variants remain unrecognized by multiple characterized expanded-recognition FLS2 homologues. Using AlphaFold 3-based structural screening of 256 natural FLS2 homologues against the flg22 epitope from Xanthomonas campestris pv. campestris (flg22Xcc), we identified sunflower HaFLS2-1 as the top structural candidate and experimentally validated its recognition through biochemical and immune-response assays. We then used ligand-proximal HaFLS2-1 residue states as a donor reference for iterative engineering of divergent FLS2 homologues from two distinct plant families, PsFLS2 and TjFLS2. Distinct recipient-specific residue solutions emerged in the two backgrounds, and representative functional variants carrying ten or fewer amino-acid substitutions acquired flg22Xcc recognition. Together, these results show that, for this defined flg22Xcc escape challenge, AF3-guided discovery and iterative local sequence exploration can reconstruct recognition across divergent FLS2 scaffolds through a limited number of receptor substitutions.
Matching journals
The top 6 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.
Similar papers in this journal
Similar papers in this journal
- Natural variation of immune epitopes reveals intrabacterial antagonism 94%
- Bioengineering a plant NLR immune receptor with a robust binding interface towards a conserved fungal pathogen effector 91%
- Evolution and Diversification of Carboxylesterase-like Cyclases in Aspidosperma and Iboga Alkaloid Biosynthesis 91%
Similar papers in this journal
- Protein engineering expands the effector recognition profile of a rice NLR immune receptor 95%
- Evolutionary gain and loss of a plant pattern-recognition receptor for HAMP recognition 92%
- Structure-Function analysis of Lactiplantibacillus plantarum DltE reveals D-alanylated lipoteichoic acids as direct symbiotic cues supporting Drosophila juvenile growth 92%
"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.