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Tandem Protein Kinases Emerge as New Regulators of Plant Immunity
 Name: Valentyna Klymiuk Current Position: Postdoctoral researcher, Crop Development Centre and Department of Plant Sciences, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, Canada. Education: M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in hydrobiology at Donetsk National University, Donetsk, Ukraine; Ph.D. degree in plant genomics and host-parasite interactions at the University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel. Non-scientific Interest: Hiking, playing piano, cross-stitching. Brief Bio: I obtained my B.S., M.S., and one of two Ph.D. degrees from Donetsk National University, Ukraine. These degrees were in the area of hydrobiology, in which I focused on biodiversity and ecology of microalgae communities of continental salt lakes. Because of my growing interest in genetics and genomics, I decided to continue my studies, and I completed a second Ph.D. degree from the University of Haifa, Israel, where my studies focused on plant genomics and host-parasite interactions. Currently, I am a postdoctoral research fellow studying the genetic basis of disease resistance in wheat and its wild relatives. More specifically, I have studied innate resistance to wheat diseases, with an emphasis on identification, gene cloning, and functional characterization of tandem kinase proteins (TKP). Decades of research on canonical immune receptors, exhibiting nucleotide-binding leucine-rich repeat (NBS-LRR) or receptor-like protein (RLP)/receptor-like kinase (RLK) architectures, have firmed their established role in plant immune response. However, there is a general lack of focus on other receptor types, such as TKPs, and my interest lies in shedding light on the role of this important protein family in plant immune response. Currently, one barley and four wheat TKP genes have been functionally validated, but many more have yet to be discovered because TKPs are widespread and diverse across the plant kingdom. To bring more attention to TKPs and highlight their role in plant immunity, together with other co-authors from this research field, I published a review article in MPMI that provides the first comprehensive summary of information for all functionally validated TKPs. A detailed literature review also allowed us to propose a model of TKP evolution through duplication or fusion event and model of molecular function, in which the pseudokinase domain is suggested to serve as a decoy for pathogen effector, while the kinase domain is essential for downstream signaling. I believe that this work provides a deeper investigation of TKPs and will pave the way for future gene manipulation and synthetic engineering of novel plant resistance genes.
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