A helping hand: signal transduction in plant immunity

Plant diseases are a continuous threat to food production and a major constraint on achieving global food security. One approach to restricting plant diseases is to understand how plant immune receptors recognise the presence of pathogens and transduce signals that lead to disease resistance. It is these plant immune receptors that breeders have used for decades to help deliver healthy crops. This project will address how intracellular plant immune receptors (NLRs) from rice function together to promote immunity. Previous work has shown the molecular basis of how these proteins recognise the signatures of pathogen infection, but we understand very little about how this recognition is transduced into a signal. This project will investigate the changes that occur within immune receptors on pathogen recognition, including the potential for conformational change and changes in oligomerisation. It will also investigate the hypothesis that conformational change promotes interactions with other cellular components leading to signalling. Each of these outcomes will be probed by mutagenesis to define their impact on function.