Aktuelle Ausschreibungen

The strain of Phytophthora infestans that caused the Great Famine in the late 1840s was caused by a single genotype that is distinct from, but closely related to, the most prevalent modern genotype.

During pathogen attack, plants recruit beneficial microbes in a ‘cry for help’ to mitigate disease development. Simultaneously, pathogens secrete effectors to promote host colonisation through vario...

After gene and genome duplications, expression divergence across cell types is not random, and it can be explained by a combination of gene age, gene funct

Join us in exploring the hidden functions of ancient immune proteins in bacteria. Bacteria, like plants and animals, have evolved sophisticated systems to detect and respond to threats.

What makes a plant killer lose its edge? This project will investigate why fungal pathogens lose virulence when they are grown in laboratory culture away from their host plant. Use cutting-edge…

Plant cells are connected to their neighbours via ‘tubes’ called plasmodesmata, creating an interconnected cytoplasm that joins cells within and between tissues and organs.

The fossil record demonstrates that filamentous microbes invaded ancient plant cells with intracellular hyphal structures over 450 million years ago. To this day, a rich diversity of extant land plant...

Plants secrete a variety of proteases as a defense response during infection by microbial pathogens. However, the relationship between their catalytic activities and antimicrobial functions remains la...

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.