Molecular chaperones assist with the folding and assembly of protein clients. Consequently, they are essential to diverse cellular functions. In most aerobic photosynthetic organisms such as B-cyanoba...

Sea slugs steal foreign chloroplasts and store them in specialized organelles that facilitate photosynthesis and eventual digestion to mediate starvation resistance.

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

Background Variation within the prokaryotic pangenome is not random, and natural selection that favours particular combinations of genes appears to dominate over random drift. What is less clear is wh...

The forecasted global climate changes will expose plants to challenging environmental conditions that further increase outbreak risks and threaten ecosystems and food security. The sole host defense mechanism plants possess is innate immunity. This system relies on extra- and intracellular receptors mediating pattern- and damage-triggered immunity (PTI/DTI) and effector-triggered immunity. Here, we discuss how environmental changes can alter the expression dynamics of extracellular receptors activating PTI/DTI, the so-called pattern-recognition receptors, and cell wall integrity sensors. We examine possible crosstalk between selected abiotic stress and immune signaling and briefly argue how two major abiotic stress-related transcription factor families, such as the heat stress factors and dehydration-responsive element-binding/C-repeat-binding factors, cooperate with immune signaling during acclimation responses.

Modification of the nucleotide pool is emerging as key to innate immunity in animals, plants and bacteria. This Review explains how immune pathways conserved from bacteria to humans manipulate the nuc...

Receptor kinase FLS2 detects the flg22 epitope of bacterial flagellin. Here the authors identify key residues on FLS2’s concave surface that enable expanded perception of flg22 variants, allowing the ...

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