Cell surface receptors networks control plant development and defenses
E. SMAKOWSKA (1), A. Mot (2), D. Desveaux (3), D. Guttman (3), Y. Belkhadir (1) (1) Gregor Mendel Institute of Molecular Plant Biology (GMI), Austria; (2) Department of Cell & Systems Biology, University of Toronto, Canada; (3) Department of Cell & Systems Biology, Centre for the Analysis of Genome Evolution & Function, University of Toronto, Canada

Since plants are fixed in space and cannot escape their environment through locomotion, they cope with highly ?uctuating environments. Plants use an expanded family of cell-surface receptor kinases (RKs) to transduce signals from the environment. A typical plant RK is organized as follow: an extracellular domain (ECD), a single-pass transmembrane domain, and in most cases a functional intracellular kinase domain. ECDs can physically interact with small ligand molecules that are either secreted from surrounding cells (self signals) or presented by microbes (microbe associated molecular pattern (MAMPs). Detection of small molecule ligands often trigger homo? and hetero?oligomerization effects with other receptor. Ultimately this leads to the assembly of signal competent receptors for appropriate signal transduction and orchestrated plant growth and defenses. Owing to the inherently transient nature of their interactions and bottlenecks with their expression in heterologous systems there is very limited knowledge on the global interaction network ECDs can form. First, I will present how a high-throughput oligomerization-based methodology allowed me to circumvent these bottlenecks thereby allowing me to establish systematically the ECD interaction networks for more that 200 leucine-rich-repeat receptor kinase (LRR-RKs). Second, I will demonstrate how I exploited my network to discover new functional interactions to better understand growth and defense signaling systems.

Abstract Number: C6-3, P14-423
Session Type: Concurrent