J. C. De la Concepcion

The paper bioengineers a plant NLR receptor to recognize a conserved fungal effector, resulting in durable resistance against blast fungus isolates.

This study shows how the helper NLR NRC2 converts from a homodimer to a higher-order oligomer upon activation by the sensor NLR Rx, revealing the molecular mechanism of plant immune activation.

This paper demonstrates how allelic compatibility in the Pik NLR pair can be exploited to engineer NLRs with expanded effector recognition specificities without causing constitutive cell death.

This paper reveals how the blast fungus effector AVR-Pii binds to rice Exo70, modulating immune recognition through a novel Zinc-finger fold and conserved hydrophobic interface.

The paper engineers rice NLR receptors to recognize new effector variants by incorporating effector targets, enhancing disease resistance against blast fungus.

The paper identifies CFS1 as an autophagy adaptor that connects autophagosomes with the ESCRT-I component VPS23 to form amphisomes, facilitating vacuolar delivery in plants.

The paper introduces pOPIN-GG vectors enabling modular cloning for rapid protein expression with various tags, maintaining expression levels and supporting complex purification.

The paper shows that allelic specialization in rice NLR receptor pairs confers resistance to fungal strains and reveals a single amino acid polymorphism driving preferential association between matching pairs.

This paper identifies a single amino acid change in the Pikh allele of a rice immune receptor that extends resistance to multiple strains of the blast fungus through enhanced effector binding.

This study deletes the NRC4 gene cluster in tomato using CRISPR/Cas9 and finds it does not affect flg22-induced immunity.

This study uses structure-guided engineering to expand the effector recognition of a rice NLR receptor, showing improved binding and immune response to variant effector proteins.

The paper identifies the N-terminal β-strand and a single amino acid polymorphism as key determinants of binding specificity for the ATG8 isoform in potato, shaping interactions with PexRD54 and other plant proteins.

The paper examines three effectors from the rice blast fungus and their corresponding rice NLR immune receptors to highlight general concepts of plant-microbe interactions and identify 12 lessons in effector and NLR biology.