Pattern recognition receptors such as FLAGELLIN SENSING 2 (FLS2) are central to plant immunity and attractive targets for engineering broader detection of bacterial phytopathogens. However, evaluating...

Directed evolution can rapidly generate genetic variants with new and enhanced properties, yet efficient platforms for performing such evolution directly in plant cells have been lacking. We developed...

Harnessing synthetic biology to engineer resilient crops

This study shows that RWT4, a wheat tandem kinase, confers resistance to the fungal pathogen Magnaporthe oryzae by directly binding to the pathogen effector AvrPWT4 and activating host defense.

It is more than 40 years since the era of transgenic plants began and more than 30 years after the cloning of the first plant disease resistance genes. Despite extensive progress in our mechanistic u....

The 2025 Gordon Research Conference on Wnt Signaling will be held in Lewiston, Maine. Apply today to reserve your spot.

Justine Beaulieu was impacted by the Trump layoffs days before she was due to give birth, losing her maternity leave and her health insurance in limbo.

Linking sequence variation to phenotypic effects is critical for efficient exploitation of large genomic datasets. Here we present a novel approach combining directed evolution with protein language m...

Climate change-enforced drought stress conditions and diseases caused by pathogens often co-occur and represent one of the greatest challenges in plant science. Wilt pathogens that colonize water-cond...

In Arabidopsis roots, growth initiation and cessation are organized into distinct zones. How regulatory mechanisms are integrated to coordinate these processes and maintain proper growth progression o...

Rapid development of immune receptors that protect crops from emerging pathogens is a paramount goal. We applied high throughput directed evolution to the ligand binding domain of the rice immune rece...