Chinese Bulletin of Botany ›› 2019, Vol. 54 ›› Issue (3): 288-292.DOI: 10.11983/CBB19035

Special Issue: 逆境生物学专辑 (2019年54卷2期)

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Open a Door of Defenses: Plant Resistosome

Shitou Xia1,*(),Xin Li2,*()   

  1. 1. Hunan Provincial Key Laboratory of Phytohormones, College of Bioscience and Biotechnology, Hunan Agricultural University, Changsha 410128, China
    2. Michael Smith Laboratories,Department of Botany, University Columbia,Vancouver, BC, V6T 1Z4,Canada
  • Received:2019-02-23 Accepted:2019-04-03 Online:2019-07-01 Published:2019-05-20
  • Contact: Shitou Xia,Xin Li

Abstract: Nucleotide binding, leucine-rich repeat (NLR) immune receptors are a major family of plant resistance (R) proteins, which are also found in animals. NLRs turn on immune signaling by recognizing pathogen-specific effectors in plants. Although the first few plant NLR R genes were cloned more than 25 years ago, the activation mechanism remained elusive. No structure is available for the full-length plant NLRs despite attempts over the last 2 decades. Recently, studies from the Chai, Zhou and Wang labs, published in Science, solved the structure of zygote arrest 1 (ZAR1) before and after effector recognition, which fills a huge gap in NLR biology. This mini review briefly summarized these findings and related progresses, and highlighted further challenges in NLR-mediated immune signaling field.

Key words: plant immunity, NLR, ZAR1, allosteric activation, resistosome