The rapid evolution of plant pathogens poses a persistent threat to global agricultural sustainability, often outpacing the discovery and deployment of natural disease resistance genes. While bioengin...

Harnessing synthetic biology to engineer resilient crops

Prokaryotes carry clusters of phage defense systems in defense islands that have been extensively exploited bioinformatically and experimentally for discovery of immune functions. However, little effo...

Bacteria use antiphage systems to combat phages, their ubiquitous competitors, and evolve new defenses through repeated reshuffling of basic functional units into novel reformulations. A common theme ...

Plants deploy a diverse array of pattern recognition receptors (PRRs) that perceive microbe-associated molecular patterns (MAMPs) to activate immune responses. Leucine-rich repeat receptor-like kinase...

On this site, you can freely use (without any login) the DefenseFinder webservice (see below) and get help to navigate the ever expanding world of defense systems.There is a collaborative knowledge ba...

This study uncovers a highly conserved jumbo phage protein, Imp1, that possesses multiple interfaces to license protein import into a proteinaceous nucleus-like compartment, using a genetic selection that forces the phage to decrease or abolish the import of specific proteins.

Chemla et al. review the release of bacteria into the environment and propose engineering strategies to help improve performance and reduce risk.

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...