What I told early-career researchers about prediction, rigour, failure, priors — and the tyranny of bar graphs.

Pathogens target and degrade the extracellular matrix surrounding plant cells. A central question is how cell wall-derived damage-associated molecular patterns (DAMPs) are recognized and integrated to...

A mechanistic basis for how the hormone salicylic acid promotes transcriptional activation during plant immune responses is described.

Effective plant immunity requires precise spatial coordination of immune responses across cell-types to restrict pathogens while preventing tissue damage, yet the intracellular pathways that organize ...

Autophagy maintains cellular homeostasis under stress, but how membrane-trafficking regulators coordinate selective ER turnover in plants is unclear. Here,

IPB Press Release, September 3, 2026 A great success for plant research at the Leibniz Institute of Plant Biochemistry (IPB) in Halle: The independent junior research group leader Mariana Schuster has been awarded a highly funded ERC Starting Grant from the European Research Council for her FRONTERA project. Over a period of five years and with funding of 1.5 million euros, she and her team will investigate how the targeted cleavage of membrane proteins regulates the immune defense of plants.

Cytoplasmic lattices (CPLs) are filamentous assemblies essential for mammalian embryonic development. They are known to regulate organelle organization, spindle assembly, and protein homeostasis, but ...

How the BRCA1-A complex finds and removes ubiquitin signals at DNA breaks remains unknown. Here the authors show that ARISC–RAP80 binds K63-linked ubiquitin chains through multiple subunits and non-ca...

In contrast to the ubiquitin (Ub)-proteasome-system, which only degrades individual proteins, macroautophagy can eliminate protein complexes or aggregates, organelles and even pathogens. Terms such as...

Purines can act as endogenous molecular glues in human cells by anchoring a rate-limiting enzyme in purine biosynthesis to its inhibitor, and modifying this mechanism could provide a way to improve th...

With the far-right Alternative for Germany leading in polls for national and state elections, institutions are facing up to proposed restrictions on academic freedom.

Plants perceive neighboring vegetation through an enrichment of far-red light (shade) in the environment. These changes in light quality trigger molecular and physiological responses aimed at outgrowi...

Langin et al. find that ER-associated sorting (ERAS) directs NAC53/78 turnover and activation to couple proteasome induction with repression of photosynthesis genes, linking proteostasis to energy met...

Engineering the barley NLR RGH2 enhances recognition of blast pathogen effectors from rice and wheat, leading to improved disease resistance.

The HEAT SHOCK FACTOR A1 transcription factors rapidly accumulate in the nucleus after wounding and directly activate regenerative pathways in plants.

When the concept of ‘click’ chemistry — highly effective and specific reactions — was first reported, some dismissed it as a gimmick. But it has transformed many fields of research.

More than 15 years ago, during my PhD, we stumbled upon something unexpected. In a yeast two-hybrid screen, bacterial effector proteins from Xanthomonas and Pseudomonas interacted with a subunit of…

Gain or loss of a particular domain contributes to functional specialization of a conserved chitinase in beneficial root endophyte towards microbial antagonism or host immune suppression.

Target-directed microRNA degradation is driven by the atypical ZSWIM8–CUL3 E3 ubiquitin ligase that uses a two-RNA-factor authentication mechanism to specifically recognize AGO–miRNA–trigger...

Ubiquitin-binding shuttle proteins are important components of stress-induced biomolecular condensates in cells. Yeast Dsk2 scaffolds proteasome-containing condensates via multivalent interactions wit...